Scenariocraft

Inspiration

What it does

How we built it

Challenges we ran into

Inspiration

When I was a kid, inventing a game meant a few planks of wood, a couple of rusty nails, and whatever rules we could argue into existence before dinner. My kids have the same itch to invent, but their world is digital, and until now digital meant one thing: consuming. Build Week gave us the excuse to test a different idea: that with a coding agent, a family can stop being consumers of games and become creators of them.

So we ran it as a family experiment. Our kids' council (ages 7, 10, and 17) invented the game they actually wanted to play. The 7-year-old brainstormed challenges and audited the judges for fairness. The 10-year-old designed the game itself, plus the Speed Build name and logo (working with ChatGPT). The 17-year-old contributed engineering through his own Codex sessions. I turned their ideas into GitHub issues, and Codex built the game.

What it does

ScenarioCraft turns our kids' game ideas into playable family rituals. Speed Build is its reference scenario #1, not the product: the product is the repeatable loop where kids invent, we spec it together, an agent builds it, and an AI panel referees it.

Speed Build is an AI-refereed party game for Paper Minecraft servers (NOT an official Minecraft product). One round, seven steps: everyone gathers at a Secret Chest, one player is chosen to open it, a secret challenge is revealed ("A moon base for cats"), everyone builds behind anti-peek walls against the clock, the walls dissolve, everybody tours the gallery, and then a panel of three GPT-5.6 judges (Professor Brickworth, Captain Sparkle, Granny Redstone) scores every build on one shared rubric: theme, creativity, effort, detail. Every builder gets one genuine strength and one useful tip. Warm, fair, funny: that was the 7-year-old's requirement, and the judges are prompted accordingly.

It works across the household: iPad, Windows Bedrock, or Java PC on one kid-safe server. A stranger can run the whole thing with Docker in about ten minutes.

How we built it

The rule we set on day one: the kids specify, Codex builds. Every slice of the game started as a public GitHub issue, and Codex implemented it, with a session receipt on each delivery PR. That trail is the project: 29+ issues opened, 26+ PRs merged, all in the open at github.com/agorokh/scenariocraft.

We had played a homemade prototype of this game as a family before Build Week; this repository is a clean-room rebuild created during the event. No prototype code was copied, only written specs carried over as issues.

It's called Build Week, but ours was really a build weekend: first commit Saturday afternoon, a playable core (arena, round phase machine, secret chest, countdown) by Sunday night. Monday and Tuesday made it provable: the GPT-5.6 judge CLI with a fail-closed quorum, a deterministic voxel renderer that turns exported builds into pictures for the judges, an eval suite with the kids' ground truth, the cross-device bridge, and a Docker demo instance.

We didn't just claim it works, we played it for real: open-source robot players ran a full 161-second round, and the site shows that round's unedited transcripts, renders, and verdicts.

Challenges we ran into

• Judging fairness a 7-year-old would accept. One shared rubric, three independent personas, and a fail-closed quorum so a flaky judge can never decide a family game night.
• No peeking. Per-player walls, world borders, and console-dispatched teleports had more edge cases than the whole rest of the game.
• Letting AI see the builds honestly. We built our own deterministic voxel export and renderer instead of screenshots, so the judges and the website look at exactly the blocks the players placed.

What we learned

The product was never the point; the process was. This project was a bonding exercise that happened to produce software: arguing rubrics at the dinner table, a 10-year-old defending a logo, a teenager shipping real PRs. AI is reinventing invention itself. My childhood version needed planks and nails; my kids' version needed imagination and an agent that takes their specs seriously.

What's next

More scenarios from the council's backlog: Speed Build was invented as the first of many kid-designed game modes. And more family game nights, which is the actual roadmap.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

What we learned

What's next for Scenariocraft

Built With

• chatgpt
• codex
• floodgate
• geyser
• paper