A week ago I wrote about the software factory I’ve been running for Hordes of Orcs 3. Claude, Copilot, and Codex in their right lanes. Five layers stacked on top to keep the output coherent. I said I’d come back in 30 days. I’m coming back in seven, because the process has continued to evolve quite rapidly.

This post will cover what’s changed in the process, and what’s been achieved with it.

Update: A week later, the process has evolved. Read the follow-up: Specialists in the Factory.

In 2007, the first – and hardest – hurdle to shipping my first game was getting orcs to spawn on one side of a board and pathfind around obstacles to the other side. That took me six weeks.

Last month I started the project over from scratch — Unity 6.3 client, Rails 8.1 backend, almost none of the original code carried forward. I hit the pathfinding milestone on day six. And I had a hell of a lot more to show for it.

The difference: I’m not really writing the code anymore. I’m running a small software factory — Claude, Copilot, and Codex working in shifts. Most of my time goes to game design and business planning. Most of the “development” I do is designing the protocol they follow.

Here’s the catch: The code coming out the other end is sloppy and architecturally incoherent. The tests pass and the game plays, but if you stop there, you’ve built something you wouldn’t want to live with. The interesting part of this post isn’t the 7x speedup. It’s everything I’ve layered on top to make the output coherent.

My familys recipe for monkey bread, which varies from the traditional by being a biscuit not a dessert.

As of today, Hordes of Orcs 2 will no longer be available for purchase.