Forever Fantasy: The Beginning

Every big project starts with a small step. For my latest venture, "Forever Fantasy," that first step wasn't about writing a line of game code or designing a character. It was about establishing a domain: foreverfantasy.org. It might seem like a trivial detail, but it was the first, tangible piece of a new world. And in the spirit of Baby Steps™, it was the perfect place to start.

The "Coming Soon" Page That Wasn't

With the domain live, the next baby step was to create a placeholder page. I could have just thrown up a simple "Coming Soon" message, but that felt like a missed opportunity. Instead, I decided to have a little fun. I created a simple, dark-themed page with a single, captivating feature: a continuous parade of all 46 character sprites from the game, walking endlessly across the bottom of the screen.

You can see it live at foreverfantasy.org.

This wasn't just a placeholder; it was a promise. It was a visual representation of the world I was about to build, and it was a way to share a piece of the game's soul from day one. It was also a fantastic, low-effort way to create something engaging while the real work began behind the scenes.

The Philosophy of Baby Steps™

This project, like OrcSlaughter before it, is being built on the foundation of the "Baby Steps™" philosophy. It's a simple idea with profound implications: break every task down into the smallest possible meaningful change.

This isn't about moving slowly. It's about moving deliberately. It's about ensuring that every single step is solid, verifiable, and complete before moving on to the next. This approach has been so transformative for my workflow that I formalized it into a set of rules for Cline, my AI partner. I'm thrilled to share that this philosophy has been accepted into the official Cline prompts repository and is now available for everyone to see and use.

You can view the baby-steps.md rule file here: https://github.com/cline/prompts/blob/main/.clinerules/baby-steps.md

The core of the philosophy is this: the process is the product. The goal isn't just to have a finished game. The goal is to understand how it was built, to learn from every small victory and every minor course correction.

What's Next?

With the foundation laid, the real work on Forever Fantasy has begun. We've already normalized and compressed over 9,000 asset files, another series of methodical baby steps that will make the game more efficient. The journey ahead is long, but by focusing on one small, meaningful change at a time, I know we'll build something special.

Stay tuned. The parade is just the beginning.