Deliverable #25 · 2026-09-09

Golem Hollow — the first mini-game

epic: mini-games delivered

One long voice prompt on 2026-09-08 asked for the first mini-game — Kris’s word for an area with its own rules, a start and an end — and by the following evening, after four rounds of him playing it on the phone and typing what was wrong, Golem Hollow was live. Signed off as its own version: APK v29.

What a player finds

Walk west out of the Village and you are in the hollow. A spawn point lets out stone golems, one every few seconds, and they walk to the Grove Tree at the far end and hit it. On the ground lies a scroll; walk onto it and you own the Lightning Tower spell — the first spell in the game: one ice crystal, three stone, one fire crystal, in that order. The hollow gives you the ingredients if you look: a volcano that erupts every minute or two and throws Fire Crystals around itself, an ice patch that grows Ice Crystals, and the golems themselves, which drop Stone when they fall. Cast the tower on a cell beside you and it zaps the nearest golem.

Every creature has health now, players included. Bodies block each other; a golem whose road is blocked attacks whatever is blocking it — a tower, or you; a player standing beside a golem swings at it. Get knocked down and you are back on your feet at full health where you came in. If the golems fell the tree, the hollow says so and resets. Stop thirty of them and the round is won: the golems standing crumble, and the tree drops the Life Seed — hexagram 27, Mountain over Thunder, the element the very first design doc plants to grow a tree. Whoever picks it up is told the hollow is safe, and a new round begins.

What it is made of

Almost all of it is data. Elements, spells and the kinds of complex item — golem, tower, tree, spawn point, with their stats — are three authored tables, and the things standing in the hollow are placed things: a file beside the area’s ground file, put there with a new mode of the area editor, loaded exactly like the ground. A new kind of creature is a table entry and a scene. The one-tap cast, the “You got …” reveal the first time you find a new element or spell, a pickup toast for the rest, and the ingredient cards with the spell’s slots came out of the rounds of play.

Also from those days

The realm now tells you when it is updating. When the server restarts for a deploy, every player sees “The realm is updating — you’ll be back in a moment” and the game rejoins by itself, instead of the connection simply dying.

Sources & artifacts

← related epic: mini-games

Also available as raw markdown.