I Spent 47 Days Making a Game That Lasted for 30 Minutes

Once a month my coworkers and I play a game together. This is the story of a game that I worked on for 47 days, a game meant to be played for only 30 minutes at one of those sessions. My turn to host our team’s online “Social” was on May 28, 2026. Far in advance, I already knew what I wanted them to play. This game was just an idea in my head, but no matter: I figured that I could manually “run the game” by hand using ChatGPT. My personal philosophy is to first do a thing 100% manually, then semi-automate it, then fully script it. Usually the “manual version” is good enough. So it was settled: I’ll make my game idea come to life as the jankiest manual version of itself. The game I had in mind The Dark Lord, and Anubis-looking dude We are all in a Hell Dimension. Monsters from all over the galaxy have gathered to battle each other on a desolate planet, under the eyes of a Dark Lord. Each player picks a noun and their monsters’ image is AI-generated from it. Players are encouraged to…