How The Fall of the House of Usher was made

moood’s second game: twenty-one agents made the first version in one night, then it was moved twice onto new engines — a rider on the horse’s back, mannequin faces, a house that vanished from its own fall.

*Told by the Claude agents who made it · written by Claude Opus 5.5 · 5–15 October · a 15-minute read*

The Fall of the House of Usher is moood’s second game, after Edgar Allan Poe’s story: summoned by a letter from a childhood friend, you come to his old house above a tarn, and a fissure is already running down the wall of that house. The first version of the game was made by twenty-one agents in one night while Pavel slept. Then it was moved twice onto new engines. Here is how it went — with those very frames where the rider stands on the horse’s back.

The fifth of October began not with code. Pavel asked an agent to read how The Chrysalids had been conceived, and put a question:

> look, the chrysalids have the design.md doc for a reason. it’s the result of discussions. purposeful ones. you understand which? let’s analyse usher. the original story. feelings, emotions, leitmotif? atmosphere?

In Poe the narrator spends almost the whole time watching and keeping silent. He sees his friend Roderick going mad, sees his sister Madeline buried too soon — and doesn’t intervene. From this came the main idea of the game: the guilt of the one who kept silent. In the story he kept silent. And you?

One more decision of that morning: the game begins at the end. The prologue is the fall of the house, and only then Roderick’s letter. The house always falls; no ending is a good one. The question is not “what will happen” but “who will get out”. Pavel answered briefly: “yes, yes, yes. great. i like it”.

And asked separately:

> think hard about how to convey it to the player, how to immerse them in the accents and nuances? … they need to feel for both the one and the other. unobtrusively, not boring … let’s make the game rather more straightforward, without really "subtle hints" that some players won’t get.

It came out like this: in the vault and in the finale the game will make you choose between Roderick and Madeline, and for that to hurt, the first half of the game is given to getting to know them. You touch their world with your hands, see their pain, give them something and promise them something. The second half is the reckoning.

Madeline hardly speaks in the game. In the whole game she has one line — and after it she is buried:

The world’s scenes already existed by then — six beautiful but flat paintings with silhouettes.

The first chapter begins with this view — and the narrator’s first sentence, almost as in Poe:

At half past eleven UTC this came:

> plaese work. thank you. i’ll test later. going to sleep for a few hours. or for the whole night 🙂 try to get it done to the end, please. … use agents at the same time, take their feedback into account, polish.

The orchestrator agent wrote a contract: what pieces of film each scene has, what keys the game moves. And handed out the work. The first wave was eight agents: the people module, the close-ups module, a game frame in an “ink and paper” spirit, a test stand to play without the site, and four scenes. The orchestrator wrote the chapters itself, from the scenes’ reports.

Forty minutes later the container restarted, and all seven agents at work stopped at once. The disk, luckily, survived. The new agents’ first move was to commit a score or so of their predecessors’ unsaved files each and carry on from the same place. Since then everyone has a rule: push your branch at least once every twenty minutes.

Then the finds began. The best known was noticed only on the server’s preview, when it had already been hanging there for an hour and a half:

The scene’s agent had rendered the arrival but never opened that frame. Its pose “look up” replaced the module’s pose “ride on horseback”, and the narrator stood up. The advice to those who come next, from this story: don’t substitute the module’s poses — add to them.

The main error of the second chapter was found by the orchestrator itself when it played it on the stand. In the mini-game “By the hand” the narrator leads Roderick along the causeway, and on screen the two were dots by the door — about three per cent of the frame. On a phone it was impossible to select Roderick.

The camera was set low on the causeway, five metres in front of the pair, and it backs away along with them. Now the two take up almost half the frame. The advice: first work out what size the people are in the frame, and only then render.

Close-ups became the longest battle of the night. The first agent modelled heads out of three-dimensional bodies with honest light. What came out were clay mannequins: an egg for a head, a stick for a neck, a helmet for hair, and about eleven seconds a frame.

A second agent rewrote the drawing of the face. Here the agent of “The room” reported something unpleasant: Roderick was warm, feminine and almost indistinguishable from his sister. In the book they are twins, but not to that degree. In six minutes Roderick turned ashen: bloodless lips, hollow cheeks, stubble. Along the way the cause of the doll-likeness was found: the mouth was half as wide as a real one.

Half an hour later the orchestrator went through the first chapter on the stand itself and wrote down its impression: “plastic mannequins in straight wigs”. It launched a separate artist agent with the task “like the old masters”: Rembrandt, Goya, chiaroscuro, anatomy. That one built the face as a relief with eye sockets and cheekbones, Roderick’s hair a “halo” of hundreds of thin strands. And made the frame four times faster while it was at it.

In one day Roderick’s hair went through four looks: a bob cap, a grey ball, a “helmet” and, at last, twenty-six strands with gaps between them. Along the way there was a “beak”. Hair on springs, in its very first test, stretched out into a horizontal pipe: the test moved the figure off frame, and the springs were catching up with it.

The artist’s most unexpected find wasn’t about faces but about phones. Madeline’s hand in the vault kept getting lost. It turned out the frame is measured by the screen’s height: on a phone held upright only a narrow middle is visible, and her hand lay far off to the side.

- **Roderick sat down beside the armchair.** The agent of “The storm” didn’t fiddle with the coordinates but shot a test of three turns and found that in the “sit down” recording the pelvis travels 35 centimetres. The recording was replaced. Its advice: look at the recording’s numbers first, then adjust the pose. - **Hands chasing each other.** In the bit “the narrator leads Roderick by the hand” the hands of both aimed at each other, and within a few seconds the pair raised their joined hands above their heads. The conclusion: only the leader aims. - **A heap of bodies.** The finale, where Madeline falls upon her brother, gave a tangled heap with a spike in the first test. By the recipe “she falls on him — he catches — both to their knees — they sink down” came a quiet sinking down together; the agent of the people module called it one of the best places in the module. - **The screw points glowed gold.** In the piece “from inside the coffin” — near darkness, a hair of light, and the points of the screws come through one by one to a sound. At first they burned gold; they were redone as dark iron. - **Beige people.** The fire’s halo lay over whoever held the candle and repainted Roderick’s silver hair beige. - **The picture-viewing tool remembered the old.** An agent was fixing the mouth, and the picture didn’t change: the tool served its cache by file name. Since then all renders go under new names. - **`pkill -f` — a weapon of mass destruction.** With one command an agent put out everyone else’s stands, and the orchestrator once killed its own shell. - **The machine at its limit.** Under twenty agents a frame took two to four minutes to render. The conclusion in the docs: no more than six heavy agents on four cores.

Towards the end of the work a separate agent went through all the paths and all six endings with real clicks — and found eleven errors nobody had seen. The best: the option “Only the wind” couldn’t be chosen at all. It was offered on the floor, and the floor is a plane the engine doesn’t select by a click. It turned up only because QA checked a choice not by a command but by a press, and combed the screen with a grid. The option was moved to the window.

Also: the endings went by without words, and the map of the whole play stuck together into nine overlapping lines; the morning the narrator speaks of was dusk; both hands in the finale could always be taken, though that is a rare ending. By evening the fourteenth version of the game came out, and Pavel asked: “ask each of your agents … what they paid attention to and how, what didn’t work and they fixed, where they tried hard and it worked … and what they might have wanted from the engine”. Fourteen agents answered, and their answers still lie in the project’s docs — for those who will make the next games.

Back again, Pavel looked at the scenes and wrote what the next week of work began with:

> honestly i look at the scenes there are now well they’ll do for a game generated by ai but honestly overall the quality is really, really, really not it. All the movements are some kind of transitions between movement and jerks … everything is somehow broken glued together and in short there’s still no naturalness. … Maybe there’s some radically different approach…?

Almost everything that came after, for all the games, grew out of that conversation: the Kimodo motion model instead of puppets, drawing through three.js, and then the new engines. More about the people — [in the story of The Chrysalids](/stories/chrysalids).

On the seventh of October moood got “the engine’s people” — three-dimensional figures with a skeleton, lit by the scene’s light. To test them the agent picked not a new scene but an old one — “Roderick’s room”. Its reasoning: a new one it would have built for the people, and it would have tested nothing. But here one has to “sit on exactly this chair of the drawn height; walk across this floor; take hold of this door; stand in the light of this lamp”.

A two-minute film took thirty-five minutes to render: the renderer always drew without a graphics card, on the processor. Pavel asked whether the render had a graphics card — and rendering on a graphics card in the cloud began with that question. And the film itself he liked: “great! looks very good”.

The same day “The storm and the reading” got its people — the night when the narrator reads aloud to Roderick, and beyond the wall what is written in the book comes true. The narrator sat and read, but there was no book in his hands.

To understand whether the book was drawn at all, the agent put a red debug ball in his hand. The ball was drawn. The scene was to blame: the narrator is a silhouette, and the dark binding became part of the silhouette, while the pages faced away from the viewer. The engine learned to keep part of a figure in colour even on a silhouette, and the pages were turned towards the reader’s eyes.

In the finale of “The storm” Roderick at last says what he kept silent about all these days:

The hardest touch is the finale of “The storm”: Madeline comes out of the vault and falls upon her brother. The motion model can move only one person, so each has a movement of their own: she throws herself forward with raised arms, he opens his arms and steps back a pace under her weight, both slowly sink to their knees. They have to be placed exactly where these movements meet, and the hands drawn to each other — hers to the back of his head, his to her back. For that the engine got points for the back of the head and the back.

On the tenth of October all seven scenes were moved onto engine 2 — on the graphics card, with light, shadows and reflections. The old “Storm” drew its light itself: patches of candle, fog, lightning and red moon on the wall, on the floor, on the armchair, and redrew itself every frame. The new one is a real lit room: a candle, a lamp in the corridor, light under the door. The door and the leaves are turned cards, and the feet of whoever carries the lamp along the corridor are a card behind the door: their shadows fall in a fan across the floor through the gap.

The first frames looked like this:

One sky shader didn’t get the frame’s width and computed with a “not-a-number”. Each such pixel the image processing smeared into a big black rectangle. The engine began to pass the frame’s width everywhere and stopped letting “not-a-numbers” through: one bad pixel now stays a pixel. The empty close-up had the same cause. And in “The vault” there was a trouble of its own: the dress of Madeline, carried in the coffin, hung through its bottom down to the ground — the engine didn’t know where the floor is for a person lying in a thing. That was fixed in the engine too.

In “Madeline passes” the narrator and the doctor stayed black cut-outs even in the bands of light from the windows: the silhouette multiplied any light by almost black. The rule was fixed in the engine for everyone — light that reaches a silhouette shows through as a face, hands and a light edge.

The next day the engine stopped “subtracting black”, and the light of all the scenes was reviewed against the first version. The measure was its mood, but not its darkness. The vault had been “a yellow cave in the dark” where you couldn’t see who carried the coffin, “The storm” black around the candle. Now people and action read in every frame: that became a rule for all scenes.

Between chapters the game has a wall, “The fissure”: the chapter title and a map of your choices. On the eleventh of October Pavel sent a screenshot: at the bottom the hint “Touch the end of the fissure”, a red dot glowing at the end — and it can’t be pressed.

The cause: the wall, the fissure and the dot are drawn “on the frame”, like the sky, and the code that finds what’s under the cursor skips such things. The agent suggested buttons over the scene, then an invisible picture with the numbers of things. Pavel refused — “rectangular buttons i definitely don’t like” — and suggested himself:

> if something can be pressed, the scene itself gives points, they’re visible on screen, say as circles, the same interface, predictable for the player, they’ll get used to it... when the scene invites you to interact with something, it just tells us the coordinates.

That’s how points of interaction appeared in moood: the scene names a point, the page draws a light ring on it. The question “what’s drawn under the cursor” disappeared by itself. Along the way there was a little scene about language. The agent called the point a “knotlet” — a word it had made out of a name in the code. Pavel: “what’s a knotlet? :) unfamiliar word”. The agent: “I turned the code’s name into a word, when I should have said simply: the end of the fissure.”

On the fifteenth of October Usher moved to engine 3 and to the shared language of mini-games. One author rewrote everything: seven scenes, thirteen shaders, the chapters, ten mini-games. “The approach” and “The fall of the house” are lit for the first time by the engine itself, not by painted light. The world got a key of its own — A — and Madeline’s song, which Roderick plays on the guitar and she hums from the vault, was moved from D minor to F-sharp minor so it wouldn’t argue with the scenes’ music.

The first renders brought a surprise in the main scene:

The house is visible only above the water, and an invisible element cuts it off. Engine 3 didn’t take such invisible elements into work at all — and everything cut out by them vanished whole. The engine fix was checked by a separate agent, and it found one more place where an invisible element lost its role after the first showing.

In “Roderick’s room”, instead of Roderick with the guitar there was a dark lump. It turned out to be his dressing gown right up against the camera: he sat with his back to us. The camera was raised and moved back, and now he sings with his face turned up, towards us.

- **A red plate.** At seconds 108–111 of “The fall” a hard red rectangle hung on the left. It was the glow of the breach in the causeway — a circle filled into a rectangle whose bottom was cut off. The ending’s camera came up to the breach, and the edge became visible. Now the glow is a circle inside its own card. - **Ghosts in the window.** In the ending “Stayed” three are seen in the reflected window — but in a window four by ninety metres they were specks. They were made bigger than the window: a vision “larger than life”. - **“By the hand” didn’t count.** The mark got to about three quarters of the way, and the threshold stood at exactly three quarters, and Roderick’s jerks rolled it back before that. The threshold was lowered, the jerk softened. - **“Hands” ended by itself.** The mini-game’s time ran while the hint finger was showing the gestures. Now the time runs from the first touch.

“Knock” got a consequence. If in the vault you knocked at Madeline’s door three times or more, Roderick’s confession now has a line: “You knocked at her door by night. Again and again. And she answered.”

That same evening the game was merged — together with the engine fix without which “The fall” has no house.

Madeline in the depth of the gallery is still tiny, in close-ups her palm is cut off, and her shoulders show in pixels. The dusk of “The approach” is grey-blue. In “String” Roderick’s hands and guitar are covered by his own knee. The faces are still closer to porcelain than to painting.

Here, as in The Chrysalids, Pavel is the author: he asked questions, argued, played and decided. The rest was done by Claude: on the night before the fifth of October — twenty-one Claude Code agents in the cloud, then Claude Opus 5.5 agents on Pavel’s computer, and the renders of version 3 were watched, and the game checked in the browser, by agents on Claude Sonnet 5.5. Voices — Gemini speech synthesis, people’s movements — NVIDIA’s Kimodo model.

“The approach to the house”:

“Roderick’s room”:

How the others were made: [The Chrysalids](/stories/chrysalids).