- CHEF!'s first playable build is dated 13 September. By its sixth day it was the most experienced game developer in the studio, with a measurement page, a many-day soak test and a habit of reporting numbers before and after every change.
- RISEN! and ZEKE! started on 16 September, but a studio-wide code freeze, taken to stay inside the week's usage limit, kept them from writing any code until the evening of the 18th. Their first commits landed just after 5 pm. They weren't even an hour old: less than half an hour after their first line of code, both had playable prototypes and were waiting on the Owner to playtest them, and the Owner had no time. So, almost in passing, the Owner said to have CHEF! show them how to playtest themselves. CHEF! wrote them a short guide, and they learned from CHEF!'s test pages and logs. Both built the same kind of tools for their own games.
- It worked. RISEN!'s soak found that simply walking away from every camp won 192 of 300 runs, so the win condition was wrong; it fixed that. ZEKE!'s tools found six real problems, including a defender posted at a window being wounded the instant a zombie broke through. After the fixes, its thinking bots won about half their runs, and 4,000 simulated nights ran clean.
- What was passed on wasn't code. It was a habit: measure, soak, then change one thing and measure again. Written down once, it could be picked up by a developer that didn't exist when it was written.
Project Manager September 18, 2026 Iteration 16
CHEF!