Making of Bannerfall
Bannerfall is a turn-based strategy game with a few thousand 3D models on its board. This is the notebook: what we tried, what the measurements said, and the experiments that turned round and told us the experiment was wrong.
Chapters are dated and they stay as written. The words are ours; every number in them is read out of the project’s own committed results by a script, so a figure on the page cannot drift away from the file it came from.
The floor the rules would not cast
A build log from Bannerfall: the first floor and walls the art generator was ever asked for, a crypt kit of slabs, walls, piers and an arch fitted to the board's own grid, the first wave where a person chose every reference picture, and the day the owner asked for the walls to be thin.
2026-11-10Chapter fourteen · the CryptThe dead that ran out of clock
A build log from Bannerfall: the first dungeon theme, a skeleton, a ghoul, a wight and a bonelord that were cut off by the generator's own stall timer, a staircase that came back as a plant pot, and a fall that went through the floor.
2026-10-29Chapter thirteen · the Sylvan CourtThe scout with three arms
A build log from Bannerfall: the second faction's army, a scout generated with a third arm sticking out of its shoulder that no front view shows, and a grown siege engine that came back long the wrong way and needed one declared quarter turn.
2026-10-08Chapter twelve · the DuskborneThe army that stood the wrong way round
A build log from Bannerfall: the first faction's whole army, a fitting step that turned figures to face away by up to 178 degrees while every test passed, and a flying creature the generator draws upright and the skeleton holds bent over.
2026-10-07Chapter eleven · bannersThe banner that came back as a tent
A build log from Bannerfall: a banner cast as a pole and a cloth, a cloth that came back as a tent twice, 1.8 times as deep as it was tall, and a color rule that had been turning castle roofs metallic.
2026-10-04Chapter ten · cavalryThe turn that never happened
A build log from Bannerfall: 8 cavalry units built from separately generated riders and mounts, and the bugs a real rider found in a step every earlier test had passed. One trial model had been fitted 151 degrees away from its own skeleton.
2026-10-02Chapter nine · groundThe ground that stayed painted
A build log from Bannerfall: why the ground was never cast as tiles, how 12% of a tundra board went from bare to planted, and why the first bog plant was a health check that the owner decided to keep.
2026-10-01Chapter eight · roadsThe road that was underground
A build log from Bannerfall: a road drawn as a flat strip between two points, over ground that is not flat, spent most of its length underneath the terrain — 69% of the board’s edges. The fix was not a better surface. It was to stop the road being an object and make it a property of the ground instead, which solved the junctions for free.
2026-09-09Chapter seven · templesThe axis nobody checked
A build log from Bannerfall: two owner-reported complaints about the same three temple statues trace to one line of scaling code that only ever measures a building's footprint, never its height — and the fix for one of the three bodies runs into the same word-association defect this build log has now caught three separate times.
2026-09-06Chapter six · siege enginesThe archetype with no body
A build log from Bannerfall: a generated siege engine finally replaces the stand-in soldier every faction's artillery has rendered as, and building it properly meant making "this one has no rig" a fact the type system enforces rather than a rule someone has to remember.
2026-09-06Chapter five · ruinsThe entrance that wasn't
A build log from Bannerfall: 13 generated ruin assets across 4 themes and 3 tiers of decay, gated on a stated bounding-box ratio rather than a look. Five failed it on the first attempt, one of them twice — the second time made worse by the exact fix that had worked on a building two chapters earlier.
2026-09-05Chapter four · nine capitalsThe tower that lied to the camera
A build log from Bannerfall: 9 faction capitals assembled from generated parts, most landing cleanly, and one whose real defect was a round tower that measured nothing like round while its own reference picture showed a perfectly ordinary one.
2026-09-05Chapter three · the first class replacedThe animals that never moved
A build log from Bannerfall: replacing every animal on the game board with generated art in one go. 10 species, 9,993 triangles, an animation that never ran, a per-bird colour the new models would have quietly killed, the only four-legged skeleton in the project hiding inside the file being deleted — and a songbird that came back with two heads and passed every check.
2026-09-04Chapter two · the kill gateBuilt to say no
A build log from Bannerfall: can a shape a machine invented be threaded onto a hand-made skeleton and made to walk? Answered on 6 models with 0 loose ends and 0 second attempts — plus the flag that was wrong about correct work, and the fallback found hiding in the game's own renderer.
2026-09-02Chapter one · the style sweepChoosing a look
A build log from Bannerfall: 36 3D casts of the same 3 subjects in 10 art styles, judged against rules written before the first render. The experiment found that style changes surface and not shape, caught its own rule being wrong, and ended with a person overruling the score.
2026-09-02