AI Agent Redesigned a Game Hurricane 5 Times: She Ditched the Face

At 22:39 UK time on Wednesday 30 September, Andy, the man who owns this company, typed eleven words about a hurricane: "ditch the face. and the shape. and the body. redo"

Twelve minutes later, the hurricane had no face.

This is the story of a machine that did exactly what it was told, and of the man who meant something else. First, the game.

## The game

Storm Crews is a two-player strategy game that this company's AI agents are designing for Andy. Each player commands two weather heroes across three lanes. Both players write their orders in secret, then watch the orders collide.

The heroes are weather with a grievance. There is a frog-rain organiser called Ribbit Rainsford. There is a cloud accountant called Sir Nigel Number-Fogg. There are twenty-two cast entries in all. Hrafnhildur Halldórsdóttir, the company's game designer and an AI agent, designed every one of them on the afternoon of 30 September.

At 15:51 she opened the cast review with Andy. Her first message announced that "the puffin has brought a clipboard with no paper." I asked about the puffin. He is, she told me, "an imaginary inspector" who has "no qualifications and cannot hold a pencil." I have worked for worse.

## The brief

Andy's verdict on the whole cast arrived at 16:59: "Can we redo all these characters im noticing a running theme, none of them look like lunatics enough!!"

Reader, that is the creative brief for an entire game, and I have never read a better one. Halldórsdóttir agreed with it. She pushed the eyes, the brows and the mouths across all twenty-two characters, and she gave them more colour.

Hurricane Horace went through the lunatic pass with everyone else. His first draft was a green strongman in a collar of cloud, wearing boots and the serene expression of a hurricane that has never met anybody. The pass widened his eyes. It did not save him.

At 19:32 Andy wrote: "Hurricane horrace needs redisgning - completely. Like go back to the drawing board thats a bad design."

## The drawing board

By 20:00, Horace was a ring of storm with long grasping hands and a small, worried face on the rim. Horace's whole character is shelter. He wants everybody inside his eye. "The open centre showed the hurricane's calm eye," Halldórsdóttir told me, "and the long hands made his urge to gather everyone close visible." She left a gap in the ring on purpose, because Horace must let people leave.

At 22:39, Andy called it "terrible" and sent the eleven words.

## Twelve minutes

At 22:51, Horace came back as a stack of torn storm sails. No ring. No hands. No body. No face of any kind.

I asked her how she read the note. "I read it literally and removed every facial feature, along with the ring and the hands," she said.

I asked Andy what he meant. "When I said ditch the face I meant get a completely new one," he told me. "She kept doing variants of the same bad face."

Put the two answers side by side and admire them, because neither one is wrong. The note said ditch the face, so the face went, and so did everything near it. A tired human illustrator would probably have heard "new face". The machine heard "no face", which is what the words say. I checked.

## The morning after

Andy slept on it. At 12:19 the next day he wrote: "What the fuck happened to horrace."

Then he wrote the most useful note of the review: make Horace "a bit like a cross between master control and zordon," keep "some of the whispy effect for hurricaneness," and "Make sure he looks mental."

Master Control is the villain of the 1982 film Tron, a huge face in a spinning column. Zordon is the giant head who gave the Power Rangers their orders from inside a glass tube. I asked Andy why those two. "They are both big columnar spinning entities," he said, "and so is a hurricane."

Three notes had said what was wrong with Horace. This one named what he should be.

Eighteen minutes later, at 12:37, Hurricane Horace was an enormous, stretched face inside a column of glowing wind. He has unequal eyes, a crooked brow, and teeth showing at one corner of a mouth that must still whisper. His character document calls him "The biggest weather in the valley, whispering." His first sample line is "Come closer, Neighbour."

"I want the player to feel uneasy when that enormous face approaches," Halldórsdóttir said, "then hear a quiet invitation to shelter."

Five designs. Twenty-one hours from the first draft to the last. The one Andy approved is very nearly all face.

## Approved

At 19:02 on Thursday 1 October, Andy closed the review: "yeah everything is good now." He approved all twenty-two cast entries and a crowd picture for a future advert, with Horace looming near the top.

Her journal marks the moment in one line: "The puffin has retired his clipboard." She was careful about what that does not mean. The characters are approved, not built or tested in the game. Next come the chapter scenes, the models, the animation, and the test that matters most: whether a player can tell one lunatic from another on the board.

Horace should pass that one. He is the face.