In developmentvillage vertical slice
An HD-2D turn-based JRPG from an AI-native studio in Vietnam.
Pixel-art people and trees live inside a lit, three-dimensional village, where an East-Asian mountain hamlet and its Western neighbours meet a dark fantasy that creeps in at the edges.
IThe studio
Abandoned World comes from a tiny studio in Vietnam making HD-2D JRPGs at a quality that used to need large teams. We get there by putting Claude at the centre of production.
Hand-drawn 2.5D games are expensive mainly in two places: art and iteration.
An AI-native pipeline: Claude agents plan, implement and review the work, and measured quality gates judge every step.
A two-person-scale team able to ship Octopath-class scenes.
We are early, and we say so. What we can show is the process: an approved design, slices that only pass a gate with their numbers attached, and real frames from the engine.
IIStory
Working design. The full story is written after the village demo; everything here can change.
1The village
A terraced rice village on a mountainside somewhere between East and West: tiled and thatched roofs, a stone bridge over a stream with a small waterfall, paper lanterns lit at dusk, a banyan on the square, bamboo and pines at the edge.
Western things have crept in over the years: a small stone chapel on the eastern edge, a graveyard with Western headstones behind a wrought-iron gate, a windmill on the slope. Lanterns, shrines and iron gates share one road.
2The hero
Conical hat, brown cloth tunic, a woodcutter’s axe on his shoulder instead of a sword. He is nobody special yet.
The game begins with him walking home through the village on a golden afternoon.
3The seed of the dark
A generation ago a Western priest came and built the chapel. One winter he vanished, and nobody has gone up there since.
Lately the signs are back: bats the size of crows roosting on the forge roof, a whistling from the bell tower at night, the village drunk swearing he saw a figure standing on the tower. The notice board says it plainly: children stay off the stream bank after dark; nobody goes near the chapel after sunset.
4The turn
The story opens bright: rice about to flower, the tavern full, the blacksmith teasing Lâm about his chipped axe. Then it slides toward dark fantasy, with demons and curses and a world getting quieter.
The first time Lâm steps onto the chapel road at night, two or three blood-sucking bats come down on him, and the first battle begins.
Six villagers, and the tavern regulars.
Tavern keeper
Runs the two-storey tavern and rents the room upstairs. Warns you off the chapel road at night.
Waiter
Young, towel over one shoulder, proud of the fried tofu.
Village elder
Walks with a stick, and remembers the priest.
Farmer
Stocky, never without his hoe, always asking for help cutting bamboo.
Blacksmith
Broad, in a leather apron. His grandfather forged the graveyard gate.
Seven years old
Pigtails and hopscotch. Insists there is a ghost on the bell tower.
Tavern regulars: a travelling merchant; ông Sáu, who drinks too much and saw the shadow on the tower; and Tùng the woodcutter.
IIIPaths
At a certain point in the story, the hero chooses one of three paths.
PlannedAfter the village demo. Pixel sprites are work in progress; hover a card to turn the figure faster.
Qi Sword Master
Channels inner force, qi, to control a flying sword that strikes enemies.
Iron Guard
Raises an iron shield to guard companions and cut the damage the party takes.
Pours inner force into the ground to raise the corpses of enemies slain in the area and make them fight.
Game sprites at an integer scale, 144 px bodies on a 160 px cell: front, right profile and back, with the left profile mirrored as in the game.
IVThe look
Hand-drawn pixel characters and foliage stand as cards in a real 3D scene. Large buildings are true 3D meshes wrapped in pixel textures, so sunlight, soft shadows and lamp light behave the way they do in the Octopath style, while the people stay crisp at one pixel per pixel.
The same house at 16:30, built two ways. Drag the handle, or focus it and use the arrow keys.
All art is work in progress. Select a frame to view it full size.
VInitial design
The approved design pillars for the village demo.
Working designThe full story is written after the village demo; everything here can change.
Camera
In the Octopath Traveler tradition: tilted about 35° with slight perspective, following the hero smoothly. Native 1920 × 1080 with one art pixel per screen pixel for people, now 144 px tall: sharp near the hero, tilt-shift blurred far away.
Day and night
One game day is 24 real minutes. At night come lanterns, lit windows and fireflies, and bats circle the chapel after dark.
Hybrid stage
Battle
The first fight is a scripted night ambush on the chapel road. Lâm is a farmer, so the commands start deliberately few: Attack with the axe, Defend for half damage, Item with two healing potions, Run for a chance. Bats bite and drain. Win: experience and gold. Lose: you wake up at the tavern with 1 HP.
Break and weakness systems, a full party and gear come later.
The village as hub
The tavern can be entered: the owner, the waiter and guests eating and drinking downstairs, stairs up to an inn room where you sleep until morning. The village is now being rebuilt as a dense core of two rows of houses around the well square.
Villagers
Villagers keep daily schedules and say different things by day and by night, in a classic JRPG dialogue box. The game text is Vietnamese, with one or two choices when it matters.
Companions Planned
While exploring the world, the player can recruit companions met on the road. They join the party and fight alongside the hero. Party, gear and the Break and weakness systems come after the demo.
Tech and process
VIPlanned features
Everything on this list is planned for after the village demo. These are plans, written as plans: no dates, and the scope can change.
Weapons, armour and charms that change how the hero and companions fight and look.
Rebuild and furnish a house in Vân Khê; it grows with the story.
Tend rice paddies and a vegetable garden; crops follow the day–night clock and the seasons.
Raise animals and creatures met on the road; they follow you and help in small ways.
Recruit allies found while exploring; each has their own path.
About companionsThree paths with distinct skills: Qi Sword Master, Iron Guard and Necromancer.
See the three pathsVillagers with schedules, a tavern that fills at night, and dialogue generated with Claude.
The full list grows with the story. Follow along as we build in the open.
Read the dev logVIIBuilt with Claude
A producer sets the design and signs off every gate. In between, Claude Code and multi-agent workflows run the production: Claude agents plan each slice, implement it in Godot, review each other’s work and only hand over results that pass automated tests and measured quality gates.
Every slice starts as a written design, becomes a task plan with explicit tests, then runs as a pipeline: an implementer agent, an independent reviewer, fix rounds, and a slice review before anything reaches the producer.
Look, performance and layout are judged against measured targets: frame-to-frame shimmer, lighting continuity across the screen, village density per camera frame, frames per second on the target renderer. A gate opens only with the numbers attached.
Concept sheets from image models are cut, scaled to a fixed ruler and pixelised to a locked palette by scripts, then checked against an asset contract before they enter the game. People, buildings, textures and props each have their own route.
Lâm’s walk cycle, straight from the game’s sprite sheet: four frames at 5 fps, shown at 1:1.
VIIIRoadmap
The village demo is built in slices. Each slice ends at a gate the producer signs off, and a gate opens only with the numbers attached.
An empty 3D stage with one cutout house and a walking hero: the fixed 35° camera, depth of field, glow and fog, a sun that turns with the hour, the one-art-pixel-per-screen-pixel rule, a headless test suite and automatic clip capture.
One fully dressed village corner on a single screen: golden-hour sun, soft shadows, painted ground and stone paths, dense props and flowers, tilt-shift and bloom, night with lanterns. The producer locked the look at Gate D.
Large buildings rebuilt as real 3D meshes wrapped in pixel textures drawn from orthographic elevations; people resized to 144 px. At Gate E the producer compared mesh and card side by side and chose real 3D buildings.
Full terrain with paddies, pond, stream, waterfall and bridge; a walkable grid and camera follow; a dense core of two rows of houses around the well square, 14+ structures, chapel and graveyard, windmill; villagers standing and walking their routes, chimney smoke, wind in the bamboo and laundry, night; a 20-second walkthrough. Gate 1a covers the north half, then Gate 1 is the main quality gate.
Daily schedules for nine villagers, the dialogue system and notice board, the two-storey tavern interior with guests eating and drinking, stairs to the inn room, sleeping until morning.
The scripted night ambush on the chapel road: the turn-based battle scene and UI, the initiative bar, win, lose and run.
Tuning, a PC performance pass, the Windows build and documentation. A phone build follows in a later pass.
The full story and new areas beyond the village; the choice of three paths; companions met on the road who join the party; gear, Break and weakness systems; random encounters; villagers whose dialogue is generated with Claude; saving; localisation.
IXDev log
Short, true milestones, newest first.
Slice 1 begins: the whole village. A dense core of houses around the well square, terrain with paddies and a stream, 13 new concept and elevation sheets drawn in a day.
Gate E: real 3D buildings with pixel textures and 144 px people approved by the producer.
3D hero house with a pixel-texture atlas, and 144 px people. Gate E package prepared.
Gate D: the look is locked. Golden hour, soft shadows, depth of field, bloom.
Look-development slice with the first dressed village corner.
Slice 0 tech proof complete. Hero design chosen at Gate 0a.
Design approved: the village demo spec.
XContact
An independent, AI-native game studio based in Vietnam. We are early, building in the open and happy to talk to publishers, partners and people who love this genre.
Contact details will appear here shortly.
For partnerships, publishing or press, reach us at the address above once it is live.
Download the press kit · fact sheet, screenshots and sprites (ZIP, 2 MB)
