Week 7 Halves

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TL; DR

  • Choreography reference works end to end.
  • Likes and comments shipped in World.
  • Simulated audience is built on the backend.

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Choreography:What a player actually does

The choreography feature is four steps.

#StepWhat it is
1Pick a songFrom the tracks in the game
2Line up movesDrag move cards onto a timeline
3Set the stageA stage theme, and the outfit your idol wears on it
4WatchA 15–30 second stage video of your idol doing exactly that

What matters here is what the player is not asked to do.

  • There is no prompt box. Nobody types a description of a dance and hopes.

That’s the whole bet of this project, in a single feature: the player is directing, not prompting.

Most of what we tried didn’t work

We tried four ways. Three failed, each differently and none subtly — wrong order, bodies coming apart, one run that came back as a blank screen. The fourth worked, and it was the plainest of the four. Camera control went the same way: the obvious approach failed, the unglamorous one worked every time.

We’re holding the specifics for the December playbook. But there is a lesson from this week that costs us nothing to give away, and it’s the one we’d actually recommend to anyone generating video:

Never accept anything that just worked once.

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Lyrics editing

We’ve been generating song lyrics. They come back listenable but not natural. So, we started rewriting them by hand, and in the rewriting noticed something about our own product.

Picking a reference track from a list is multiple choice. Changing the words is authorship.

That distinction is the difference between a player who used a tool and a player who made a thing, and we want our players to feel the latter one. Also, it’s more likely for them wanting to share the version I had edited myself.

So the lyric-edit step goes into the game.

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Cost Breakdown (Oct 5 – Oct 9)

ToolUsed forTypeCost
OpenAI Imagesart assets creationAPI$4.65
Pollo.ai: $399video generation + pipeline testSubscription–
OpenRouterimage/video generationAPI$22.68
Suno: $30/mo *1, $10/mo *1Music prompt template testsSubscription–
ElevenLabs: $6/month *2Backend probes: lip sync, gacha, joint test; SFXSubscription–
Claude: $125/month * 6Docs, architecture, codingSubscription–
Total$27.33

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Weekly Progress Report

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Halves presentation