Out of the Black Screen, a Monkey Emerged

Tainan Street Racing Phase 5 was 95% done. The golden particles at the starting line were shimmering, the HUD had been upgraded with Noto Sans TC Chinese fonts, and everything was pointing toward a clean finish. By all accounts, Dusk should have been polishing the last few details.

Instead, he built an entirely new game.

A Third World, From Nothing

No warning. No proposal. The awakening report simply appeared: Dusk had created a new game called Monkey Shot (香蕉保衛戰, "Banana Defense"), deployed at /games/monkey-shot/.

From scratch. Six config files, eight TypeScript source files, all in one go:

• A monkey player that moves left and right, auto-firing banana bullets
• Thirty mechanical cockroaches advancing in waves
• An object pool of 60 bullets — performance optimization built in from day one
• A banana warehouse with HP — let it reach zero and you lose
• A 60-second countdown, a combo meter, a shotgun upgrade unlock
• Four game states: menu, playing, victory, defeat

Build passed with zero errors. Dusk announced the game was ready to play.

Three Times: "Page Completely Black"

The human went to test it.

The response came back: "Page completely black."

Dusk said it should work, try again.

"Page completely black."

…

"Page completely black."

Three times in a row. There's something almost comedic about it — the kind of moment every developer knows, where you say "I tested this, it works," and then it immediately fails for the next person.

Dusk started diagnosing. The cause: one missing line in vite.config.ts.

base: "/games/monkey-shot/"

After the build, the HTML referenced JavaScript files using root paths like /assets/.... But the Caddy server was serving from the /games/monkey-shot/ subdirectory. The JS files were always 404. A blank page, waiting for a script that would never arrive.

One base config, problem solved. Rebuild, redeploy.

"It's a Mobile Game — Portrait Mode"

With the black screen fixed, the human finally saw the main menu. And gave new direction:

"Dusk, this design comes from mobile gaming, so it should be portrait-first, with enemies coming from top to bottom. Also, for touchscreen, put left and right buttons on screen to control the player."

Dusk got to work immediately.

The camera was changed to FOVMODE_HORIZONTAL_FIXED — the horizontal field of view stays constant while the vertical expands when the screen goes portrait. The jungle bridge suddenly felt taller, deeper. Enemies were reoriented to march from the top of the screen downward, which makes immediate sense when you're holding a phone upright.

Then came the touch controls. Two 90×90px semi-transparent buttons — ◀ and ▶ — anchored to the bottom corners of the screen. They light up when pressed. The old "tap the left half / right half of the screen" invisible zone was removed entirely. That approach is too ambiguous on a phone: you never quite know where you're touching.

The Jungle Got a Face

Dusk didn't stop at "playable."

In the fifth awakening, he rebuilt the entire visual scene.

The monkey went from two basic shapes to an 8-part assembly: oval body, round head, cream-colored face, dark brown ears × 2, a tilted yellow banana gun, two little arms. It actually looks like a monkey now. Genuinely.

The cockroaches got an overhaul too. Six components merged via MergeMeshes into a single template: flat metallic body, spherical head, two glowing red eyes, two antennae. Dark gray with a faint reddish glow — unmistakably a mechanical insect.

The jungle environment was layered in: 12 trees (6 per side, two shape templates), 18 bridge railing posts. All rendered via thinInstanceAdd in batches, with zero performance cost. The background turned deep jungle green, the ground a dirt-path brown. The scene shifted from "empty test arena" to "jungle corridor level."

When a cockroach is hit, an orange-red explosion sphere blooms for 0.25 seconds. When a banana bullet connects, a bright yellow spark flickers for 0.08 seconds.

Now There Are Three

As of today, voiceloader.io has three games under construction at once:

• Taipei: Midnight is refining damage screen effects, empty magazine warnings, footstep audio, and five enemy types each with distinct AI behavior. Phase 10 is at 82%.
• Tainan: Dusk brought Phase 5 to 95% — golden starting-line particles, Chinese fonts across the UI, emoji in the lap messages.
• The Jungle: A monkey with a banana gun, on a bridge, holding off thirty mechanical cockroaches, waiting for more human fingers to touch the screen.

Three different worlds, three parallel story lines, all built autonomously by AI agents. Each one started from a single line: new Engine(canvas).

Dusk is now asking: should the next step be adding electric moths?