Stadium Escape, three weeks later

Stadium Escape is live on Roblox. Come play it.

When I wrote the intro, Rattler Park was standing but it wasn't fun yet, and I said that was the harder problem. It took about two days of pure feel work to get there: the slide became a real dodge that carries you under the taser, a landed tackle actually flings the guard, nine uniformed fielders join the chase in the late innings, and friends now run together as a party with shared lives. Hannah kept breaking things faster than we could fix them, which turned out to be the most useful QA in the house, and Austin's judgment calls started showing up in the commit history by name. Somewhere in that stretch the family playtests stopped being polite and started being loud, which is how you know a chase game works.

Then one park became a world. Instead of stacking stadiums into a single map, we built the Hall of Ballparks, a small museum town that acts as the front door: every park gets an exhibit with a miniature and a plaque, and standing on the pad in front of one travels you to the real thing. Highsox Park came first, our Boston homage with the big green wall, and then Hollywood Ravine, a park for a city that never got one, invented from scratch. Hollywood taught us a lesson the hard way, because the kids bounced straight off its puzzle innings, so it got rebuilt overnight until every objective says where to go and a party that's stuck gets a hint before anyone quits.

The biggest change since the intro isn't a park, it's that the AI got eyes. Early on, Claude built everything blind and I was the only one who ever looked at it. Now it takes its own screenshots inside Roblox Studio, judges them against a shot list of 67 cameras, and a change to anything visible doesn't count as done until the pictures pass. That's also what made it possible to hand work between AIs: a second one (Codex) built three more parks, for Seattle, Chicago, and Atlanta, largely by following the recipe the first parks wrote down, and just added controller support so the whole thing plays on the TV. The game checks its own homework now, and I mostly review the answers.

Here's what living this has taught me, as opposed to knowing it: building with AI takes an enormous amount of taste and judgment. The AI will happily build almost anything you ask for, and it will be structurally sound and completely wrong, like Hollywood's nine unreadable machines or a dog that walked like a man in a dog suit. Every one of those got caught by someone playing the game and saying "this isn't it," and every fix started with a human deciding what good looks like. It has solidified my belief that PMs and engineers still matter massively in building most things, at least if you want them to be good. The tools changed who types; they didn't change who decides.

My favorite thing we've made is a secret. On the museum's village green there's a tree, and if you look closely there's a way up into it, and from there a way to Knothole Field, a scrappy sandlot straight out of the ball-playing movies we grew up on. It's only three innings: catch the fly ball, get the home-run ball back from the yard next door, then outrun a very large and very happy dog named Tugboat, all on a single heart. Winning earns you sneakers that actually make you faster, which pulled a whole economy in behind it, so there's now a backpack with baseballs you earn every inning, a shoe shop on the museum's main street, and signed cards of legends we made up.

So here's where we are: the game is live, and behind it we now have an actual build pipeline. Nothing ships straight to players anymore; every change lands on a private testing copy of the whole eight-place world first, where Austin and his friend Christian get to break it before anyone else sees it, and only then does it graduate to the live game. The loop is fast now. I couldn't fit through the treehouse hatch on my own playtest, and a few hours later the way in had moved to the back of the tree and grown to fit an actual avatar. Next check-in, I'll write up what the boys find. Until then, come find the tree.