Cover Image
Town and NPCs
Dialogue Screen
Desert Exploration
Intro Story beats
Opening screen
Inventory
Crafting recipe
Battle
Map

Inspiration

I like quiet westerns more than loud ones. I wanted something that feels like reading an 1896 newspaper, short sentences, plain facts, and to wrap that around a survival game you can play with one thumb on a phone. The hero walks west looking for the gold his father buried and for the man who took his son. Honestly the gold is just the excuse, the game is the walk/survival.

## What it does

It's a portrait survival western that runs in the browser. You escape prison with nothing and then gather, fish, mine, craft and trade your way west along a branching trail through three regions: snow, desert, and green country. The story shows up at campfires, on wanted posters, and in conversations with townsfolk, and each of them has their own way of talking. You can play it in English or Spanish (there's a switch in-game), and a parchment map fills in as you explore.

## How I built it

No engine. Plain JavaScript with three.js as the only library, packed into a single zip where you open index.html and play. I leaned hard on tests: a custom headless harness with 691 tests that fake the DOM and WebGL and run in seconds, and the packaging script won't build the zip if any of them are red. The Spanish version is a dictionary layered on top of the English strings, keyed by the exact English text, so a test can prove every line on screen has a translation and nothing gets orphaned when I edit something.

## Challenges I ran into

The prose, mostly. Playtesters kept tripping on the old-timey language I liked, so I ended up with a hard rule: if a line isn't clear on the first read, it gets rewritten. I redid basically every string in both languages. The map was the other big one, people got lost at junctions because the drawing didn't match how the roads actually connect, so I rebuilt the routes until every fork looks the same on the map, on screen, and from both directions you can walk it. Also, one leftover mirror flag in a character rig will make a bandit walk backwards through an entire playtest before anyone tells you.

## What I learned

Testers are right about where it hurts, not always about why. Tests are worth writing for words, maps and translations, not just code. And cutting stuff early almost always makes it better.

## What's next

More trail, more characters, and more depth in the exploration and survival loop. I want more recipes that combine with each other, and a real purpose for each one, not filler. I also want to add mounts (horses mainly) and mechanics associated with them.