Overview
ASK: Director's Cut, built in the open
ASK: Director's Cut is a narrative game made in Unreal Engine 5.9 for the Epic AI MegaJam 2026 (theme: Director's Cut). You are the director in the booth behind a one-way mirror, cutting live between four cameras while a confessed killer talks to a true-crime author. The ending is the cut you earn.
It was made by one person directing a studio of AI agents. Cristian Ruvalcaba wrote the screenplay it adapts (ASK, 2021) and made the decisions. Agents wrote the code, built the levels, lit them, cast and animated the characters, mixed the sound, reviewed each other's images, packaged the build and kept the records this site is built from. This site shows how, including everything that went wrong.
Counts from the runner's task log (runs.jsonl) and recovery log, 11 to 15 Nov 2026. One task can have several attempts; "blocked" means an attempt stopped and asked for something it could not do itself.
The entry
- Play it: https://saluca.itch.io/ask-directors-cut
- Jam entry: https://itch.io/jam/2026-epic-ai-megajam/rate/5355362
- Gameplay video (48.6 s): https://youtu.be/9DFrHnLjIm0
- Glass Box 1: directing a game I am not building with my hands
- Glass Box 2: Jesse, Mary-Grace and Chief Brown as MetaHumans
The submitted build is the release candidate rc1, frozen by Cristian's ruling R40 ("gold image
approved") at 10:42 PT on 15 Nov and submitted at about 11:50 PT, six hours before the deadline. The Windows zip is
941,358,247 bytes.
Read this site
- How the studio worked: the roles, the models, the gates a person kept.
- Timeline: the four days hour by hour.
- Decisions: all 40 rulings, in Cristian's own words.
- Every task: all 416 tasks, searchable.
- Reviews: the independent 1st AD gate, with frames it rejected and the fixes.
- What broke: failures with cause and fix, and where the tokens went.
- What comes next.
What shipped, by measure
Submitted by Cristian on 15 Nov at about 11:50 PT, about six hours before the 17:59 PT deadline. Entry: https://itch.io/jam/2026-epic-ai-megajam/rate/5355362.
| Measure | Value | Source |
|---|---|---|
| The gold build | rc1 = f836f589 (15 Nov 10:15 PT), Win64 Shipping package 20261115-101444, R40 |
jam-plan.json R40, git tag |
| The submitted zip | 941,358,247 bytes (897.7 MiB), sha256 caf2c703...e05e15a, no .pdb |
plan/submission-live/README.md |
| Commits on integration | 1,154 at submission; per day (PT): 11 Nov 20, 12 Nov 160, 13 Nov 264, 14 Nov 465, 15 Nov 245 | git log origin/integration |
| Milestone tags | first-playable 12 Nov, vertical-slice 13 Nov, alpha 14 Nov 05:16, beta 15 Nov (290bca4, content lock), rc1 15 Nov (f836f589) |
git tag |
| Task attempt records | 648: 429 completed, 145 blocked, 43 failed, 20 cancelled, 11 requeued | runs.jsonl |
| Distinct task ids | 416, of which 345 completed (107 fix tasks, 57 1st AD reviews) | runs.jsonl |
| Agent time in attempts | 98.8 h across every runner attempt | runs.jsonl tried[].s |
| Median completed attempt | 279 s overall; Opus 218 s (n 116), Haiku 210 s (n 15), opencode 294 s (n 39), Codex 409 s (n 14), Fable 502 s (n 170) | runs.jsonl |
| Packages | 39: Win64 Shipping 17 ok and 6 failed, Win64 Development 6 ok, web 10 failed | packages.jsonl |
| 1st AD reviews | 157: 114 with rejects, 22 clean, 21 cannot tell; 725 files rejected, 127 passed; rounds 74 first, 47 second, 36 third | runs.jsonl |
| Recovery entries | 210, with 58 person cards (13 on 13 Nov, 29 on 14 Nov, 16 on 15 Nov) | recovery.jsonl |
| Rulings by Cristian | R1 to R40 | rulings_recorded, log |
| Runner PRs | 79 merged PRs with "megajam" in the title, 12 to 15 Nov (#349 to #442) | gh pr list |
| Generated media | 218 FLUX.1-schnell images, 56 Stable Audio sounds (274 Hugging Face calls); 22 Meshy calls, 320 credits | hf-ledger.jsonl, meshy-ledger.jsonl |
| Claude Code tokens | 3.54 B cache-read, 92.1 M fresh input, 14.2 M output, 17,134 messages (section 6) | tokens.txt |
In the gold build: the four rooms lit and dressed; the MetaHuman cast (Jesse, Mary-Grace, Chief Brown, Fisher); lip-sync on the lobby, interrogation, booth, premiere and endings lines; the generated sound mix; the HUD, settings, gamepad and title; the three endings. The content lock record is plan/beta.md at beta.
Shipped beside the build:
- a 48.6 s gameplay video, 1920x1080 with game audio, unlisted on the Saluca Labs YouTube channel (https://youtu.be/9DFrHnLjIm0);
- the itch page: the corrected text, a cover and four screenshots, all passed by an independent review;
- the jam form, with the pre-jam declaration, which includes the SHI agent infrastructure.
Not shipped, or cut:
- The web build: all 10 web packages failed. The
.ucasfile was 313 to 339 MB against itch's 200 MB per-file limit, and R31 stopped web requests. - Live LLM replies through persona-relay: dropped by R26. The game has the client and the settings, and the relay is deployed but switched off (
plan/post-jam-backlog.md). - Identity faces from Mesh to MetaHuman: built but not swapped in (R33).
- Post-gold work: the subtitle fix for stage directions (011cd72a) merged after rc1, so it is not in the build. The booth polish and the round-2 1st AD notes were retired under R40.
- Brown in the interrogation room. Cristian, 11:15 PT on 15 Nov: "brown isn't really shown in the interrogation room, but that's ok, this is the first RC and the one we'll submit".