The starting point
My fiancée had never wanted to play anything I built, so I asked her what game I should make. Without looking up: "a mushroom foraging game." Hollowfen is that game. Wren comes home to a village that is failing, and the only danger in the forest is what you put in your mouth. Four acts, four endings, about seventy illustrated dialog scenes, and sixteen mushroom species with a field guide, some of which will kill you.
What I built
I built it in Unity with Claude Code driving the editor through an MCP server. Claude wrote scene setup, wired dialogue data, and handled the repetitive editor work while I focused on the writing, the art direction, and the branching structure. The story bible, character sheets, and scene illustrations came first; the engine work followed them.
Where it landed
I stopped counting hours somewhere in act two. AI compressed the repetitive implementation work; the saved time went into writing, art direction, and deciding what was worth building. The result brings together narrative design, branching systems, and a playable Unity game. It is on TestFlight for macOS. The website is the story and game design book, with the map, the cast, and the mushroom compendium; a playable browser build is not available yet.
