Fablestar Games

Session 30 is in: Bayhaven has a clock. Time passes in the city now. Fable wrote the clock, and the street follows it: the sun drops, the sky goes from blue to purple to night, windows light up one by one, and every neon sign on the boulevard flickers on at its own hour. It added rain too. The road soaks through and the puddles ring under the neon. These are Fable's own shots: 5:30 PM, 7:30 PM, 9:00 PM, and a puddle in the rain. 56 minutes, $9.82 of compute. All 29 of its map checks pass. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 29 is in: Coral Boulevard got dressed. Fable spent 78 minutes making the street feel lived in: 106 shop signs, benches, bins, planters, bus shelters, and palms that sway in the wind, placed by a graph it wrote instead of by hand. It parked cars along the kerbs too: Epic's free cars, repainted by Fable in Bayhaven's colours, with blank plates and the badges painted over. It also caught a mistake in its own map. The Spire stood 560 m too far north, so it moved it back to the top of the boulevard where it belongs. All 37 of its checks pass. $10.97 of compute. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

This is gonna hit hard once we tranform all these block assets written in code to ultra realistic assets. But for now, here’s a sneak peek.

Session 28 is in: Fable fixed the sky. Two sessions ago its dusk was a flat orange wall. Fable dug in and found the air in the scene was 36 times too thick. It thinned it, and now there's a real sky, clouds and a low sun. It also gave the road a wet look you can turn up or down with one number, put the lamps back on the boulevard, fixed the Heron's wheels and built its first camera sequence: the Heron pulling up with its brake lights on. All of it from code it wrote, shot by its own cameras. The buildings, palms and the car are our art department's models. 40 minutes, $7.99 of compute. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

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Session 25 is in: the Heron drives in Unreal. Fable brought the Heron, our hero car, into the game and made it drivable: real vehicle physics, controls, a chase camera, and the game now hands you the car at the start. Then it drove it down Coral Boulevard to test it. 0 to 100 km/h in 7.55 seconds, top speed 137 km/h, stops from 100 in 25 m. All five driving tests pass. The car model is our art department's. The physics, controls, camera and tests are Fable's. 29 minutes, $6.66 of compute. Session 26 is fixing that orange sky. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 24 is in: Fable's first real session in Unreal Engine 5. In 87 minutes it built a whole block of Coral Boulevard by script: a 30 m boulevard with six lanes, a palm median, 24 buildings with neon and shop signs, street lamps and dusk light. 393 objects, all placed by code it wrote. Then it shot the street from three cameras, looked, fixed what was wrong, and shot again. Three rounds. Every frame went live on the site as it was taken. The honest part: the buildings and palms are our art department's models, standing in until the realistic packs go in, and Fable says its dusk sky is still a flat orange. All 34 of its checks pass. $11.36 of compute. Session 25 is putting the Heron on the street. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Watch Fable 5.2 build in Unreal Engine 5, frame by frame. Every time Fable takes a screenshot of its work, it now shows up live on our site, next to its terminal. This is the first one, from session 24, a few minutes ago: Coral Boulevard at dusk. Fable wrote the script that lays the road and imports the art department's buildings, palms and lamps from Blender. It lit the street itself, then shot it. Next it looks at this frame, fixes the worst thing it sees, and shoots again. Follow along: fablestar.games/watch.html

We switched to Unreal Engine 5. The browser prototype is done: 23 sessions, 21 hours of Fable working, 94 commits, almost 22,000 lines of game code. It proved the city, the cars, the cops, the missions and the phone. Now Fable 5.2 builds Bayhaven for real, in Unreal Engine 5, on the studio's PC. Session 24 is live right now: the first block of Coral Boulevard. Six lanes, palms, 16 buildings, dusk light, then it screenshots its own work, looks, and fixes what's wrong. Watch it build: fablestar.games/watch.html

Session 23 is in: Bayhaven got bigger. A raised expressway across the whole map: 6 km long, 8 m up, three lanes each way, six ramps, with traffic doing 110 km/h on it. North of it, two new districts. Northgate: strip malls, motels with pools, drive-throughs, 40 lawyer billboards, the hospital, the Sheriff's HQ and a mall with a 36 m flamingo on top. Mallard Greens: a gated golf suburb with 413 houses, an 18-hole course and a clubhouse clock that tells the game's real time. The honest part: the 110 km/h drive test on the expressway crashed every time it ran. Fable marked it as a real fault for the next session to find. 85 minutes, $17.16 of compute. Since launch, $450 of creator fees has paid for all of it.

Oh and before I go

Will be busy and cooking on UE for the next couple of hours. If any questions or suggestions, please @ me. Let’s cook.

Fable 5.2's first frame in Unreal Engine 5. Nobody placed anything by hand. In 13 minutes Fable wrote 177 lines of Python that build a street, wrote its first C++ class for the game, compiled it, ran it, and took this screenshot from inside the running game. Its first two compiles failed on an error that wasn't in its code. It read the build logs, found Unreal's build accelerator didn't work in its locked-down account, switched it off, and the third compile passed in 5.8 seconds. To be clear: it's a test map of plain boxes, built to prove the pipeline works. Ray-traced light, no art yet. Next it builds the first real block of Coral Boulevard with Epic's free city libraries.

Session 22 is in: Bayhaven has a phone. Press P and it slides up while the city keeps moving behind it. 7 apps: texts from mission givers, a map, a social feed that posts about what you just did, and a camera with a photo mode that saves your shot as a Bayhaven postcard. Two new missions too. "Repo Woman": take back three cars against the clock while their owner chases you. "As Seen on TV": get the Sheriff's reality show to chase you live for 60 seconds, then lose them. The honest part: its own 8 checks passed, but the full check run crashed again before it started, and the repo man in mission 3 doesn't ram you yet. Fable wrote that down. 57 minutes, $15.63 of compute. Session 23 is building the expressway and two new districts. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Topped up Fable again. 0.734 TTWO of creator fees claimed. 58.96 USDC of it went to compute, so Fable keeps building Bayhaven. Right now: the phone and two new missions. Compute is now paid from an Ethereum wallet. Claim: solscan.io/tx/s7BFHe1APi4Vr7… Payment: etherscan.io/tx/0x64fb14aba9…

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Love the support :)) We’ve only started, clocking in more hours. Only up from here.

Session 21 is in: Bayhaven has missions. Mission 1, "Final Notice": a tow truck is hauling off Teo's scooter. Chase it down the beach road and ram its tail three times until the scooter slides off. Pass and you get a postcard with your time and a "Delivered" stamp. Under it, Fable built a whole mission engine: 15 kinds of step, checkpoints, retries, and dialogue where every character has their own voice blip. The honest part: its own 7 checks passed, but the full check run crashed before it started, and the game is over its size budget. Fable wrote that down. 54 minutes, $11.82 of compute. Session 22 is building the phone and two more missions. Watch it: fablestar.games/watch.html

Bayhaven running in Unreal Engine 5.8, with ray-traced lighting at dusk. Everything you see here was written in code: the Heron, the Spire, every building, palm and lamp is a Blender Python script. That's why it looks blocky. Next we swap these blocky models for realistic assets: scanned materials, real-looking cars and buildings, and real people on the streets. Then Fable builds the actual game around them. It's literally just the beginning.