Left for Mead
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Day 0: Before the jam

Pre-jam planningPre-jam
Tools used:ChatGPTClaude (project coordinator and threads)Claude Code DesktopUnreal Engine 5.9 PreviewMeshy MCPHyper3D Rodin MCPElevenLabsGmail connectorGitHub
The Left for Mead title art: a carved wooden tavern sign with the game's name above two clinking tankards.
AI-generated UI art (ChatGPT image generation, made during the jam window). Shown here as the series banner.

TL;DR: Left for Mead started as a conversation with ChatGPT, which produced our master brief. Claude took the brief, helped us lock the big design calls, and spent two days getting every tool connected. Nothing for the game was built or generated before the jam opened at 6 PM on Thursday 12 November (NZDT).

Where it started: ChatGPT and the master brief

Before the jam, Joel talked the idea through with ChatGPT online: a co-op medieval survival-horror game in the spirit of the classic four-player zombie shooters, but with drunk tavern heroes, a druid villain and a lot of dark humour. That conversation became the Left for Mead Master Project Briefing v1.2. It set out the survivors, the villain (the Briar Warden), the mead risk-and-reward idea, the Ruckus meter, a pressure director, bots, listen-server co-op and a hard low-spec target.

On Wednesday 11 November, Joel handed that brief to Claude as the project coordinator. His first instruction set the rule for everything after it: Left for Mead was the preferred game, not a commitment. When the theme was revealed, we would weigh three options (build it, adapt it, or pivot to a smaller game) and not force a weak fit. Nothing would be built until he chose a direction inside the jam window.

Wednesday 11 November: decisions and setup

What we discussed and decided. Most of the day was design talk, with Claude recommending and Joel deciding:

  • Skills: three active skills and one ultimate per hero. Skills come from each hero’s body or the kit they always carry, so they work no matter what weapon is in their hands. The Hunter’s kit became traps, throwing knives, Mark Prey and a Volley ultimate. The Guard got a buckler bash, Shield Wall, Rally and Last Stand. The Brawler got a shoulder charge, Ground Slam, War Cry and Berserker Surge. The Tavernkeeper got Bottle Toss, Cask Spill, Field Remedy and the “Round on Me!” ultimate.
  • Pings: a “point it out” button that highlights weapons and armour for the team and the bots, with a dark-humoured voice line from each hero.
  • Length: the Cursed Village as a mini-campaign of three segments, each aiming for about 15 minutes, with checkpoints. Each segment has to be finished and polished before the next one starts.
  • Bots: follow, fight and revive, with simple skill use where it is cheap. If the host drops, everyone goes back to the lobby rather than migrating the host.
  • Ending: a hilltop camp at dusk, the distant tavern lights below, and a wizard silhouette as a tease for a post-jam hero.
  • Budget: effectively zero. Free assets first, paid packs only as a fallback.

What Claude did. A small, cheap Claude model (Haiku 5.5) installed Unreal Engine 5.9 Preview on Joel’s PC next to the existing 5.8 install and tested its built-in MCP server on a throwaway project. Another Haiku thread built a jam asset catalogue from Fab and Megascans, world first, then characters, then animations. Claude installed the Meshy MCP server and set up the Hyper3D Rodin MCP connection (Joel did the sign-ins and kept the API keys out of chat). It read the jam perk emails through the Gmail connector and listed what to claim and what to cancel later. It drafted the game repo’s README and AGENTS.md, with Cursor added as a second coding agent next to Codex.

Tools used. ChatGPT (the original brief, and later a licence check on a Humble Bundle of Leartes assets, which we decided not to rely on because of its AI-use clause), Claude Code Desktop on Joel’s PC, Unreal Engine 5.9 Preview, the Meshy and Hyper3D MCP servers, ElevenLabs (connected on the Starter plan, which allows commercial use) and GitHub.

Thursday 12 November, before 6 PM: the theme and the plan

What we discussed and decided. In the morning Joel shared a second master brief for this website, the dev blog and the Codex pipeline. We agreed the site would live in its own repository and that Codex would make every change to it. At about 12:25 PM the organisers’ email confirmed the theme: Director’s Cut, “your vision, your edits, your final cut”. Claude wrote up the three options, and Joel chose to build Left for Mead. The fit was natural: this is a game Joel had wanted to make for a long time, and the pressure director becomes something players can actually see.

That afternoon Joel reworked the gear system. Heroes keep their fixed skills, but weapons and armour set a hidden class: the main weapon picks the class, and the four armour slots set how well you fit it. A Hunter in plate with a sword is allowed, just less effective. Skills ignore gear so nothing stacks out of control, and every hero gets a main weapon plus a weaker sidearm so nobody is useless at range or up close. In the lobby, each player picks a different hero and bots fill the empty slots. Challenge unlocks for future heroes (the wizard first) went on the post-jam list.

What Claude did. It checked the plan against the official rules: everything in the game must be made after 6 PM, all text and audio in English, no Unreal Engine logo on screen, teen-suitable content, and a 30 to 60 second gameplay video at 1080p or higher. It wrote a kickoff plan so that one word from Joel would start every workstream at once, and prepared the first Codex prompts. The README and AGENTS.md were pushed to the game repo as pre-jam setup.

What we did not do. No assets, models, images, voices or game code were made before 6 PM.