Vienna is too large for the number of players. Adventure mode becomes ONE room, four times the floor of the Piano Saloon, and everything the city offers is furniture in it: click anywhere and the activity starts, including sitting down at the piano to perform a piece. The rest of Vienna stays exactly as built, behind a door that opens again when the game grows. The room has to keep a new player past the first day or two without adding a single question to "what do I do now".
The rule every concept obeys: wherever you appear, the nearest thing is a piece to play, in one click (the green pins). Everything else is one click too, but never in the way. The room's job is to hand you the next piece and to look alive while you decide.
Four saloons of floor is 3072 × 2048, which is exactly a town plate. The camera, the zoom stack (fit the whole room / find me), the walk mask, the mask editor and the hotspot pills all work unchanged. Each render here is 1536 × 1024 native and ships at 2× Lanczos like the towns.
The lock lives in the one funnel, enterVienna → openVienna: every entry lands in the room, doors out say the city opens later, the travel map greys its pins. A knob, not a code path, so it can be an A/B arm the day there are enough players to test it.
The name should say what you do there. Academy collides with the headmaster game already on the main menu. Saloon is the rival ladder's name and should stay the ladder's. Quarters says "mine", which only concept C can honour. Each concept below carries its own name and one alternative.
"yeah i like B. but we need to add a 2nd piano on the stage, and also a sword on the wall for excalibur mode. agreed on the name conservatory. also we can add a few mini game tables (from D, the chess and poker tables both are a good fit). we also need a recital programme near the stage so ppl can learn whats being played today, while the bulletin board at the bottom serves as the games announcements. also i believe gpt-image-2.5 is out, do a version of this using that too (just one run is fine) and lets compare vs codex"
The same revised prompt on three generators, plus a Codex edit of the render you picked so its layout survives. The account lists two gpt-image-2.5 variants dated 2026-09-08, flare and sunburst, so both ran once. Every render carries the six changes (green pins). Pick the plate in the gallery round.
| Checklist | Codex · edit of B | Codex · fresh | gpt-image-2.5-flare | gpt-image-2.5-sunburst |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Two grands on the stage, facing, laurel between | yes | yes | yes | yes |
| Recital programme board at the foot of the stage | right of the steps | left of the steps | left of the steps | right of the steps |
| The sword on the wall (Excalibur) | above the honour board | right of the honour board | above the honour board, large | above the honour board, large |
| Chess table (SWAP, Mahjong, the harmony game) and card table (poker, Scrabble) | both, on rugs | both | both | both |
| Bulletin easel by the entrance (the games announcements) | front-left, small | front-left, large, many papers | moved to the front-right | front-left, large |
| Everything else from the picked B | one-to-one: same walls, stalls, mezzanine, dormitory, porter's desk | all present, re-laid; mezzanine narrower, four windows | all present; three windows; doors drawn open with a fanlight; timetable on a stand | all present; three windows; a red carpet on the stage |
| No people, no text, three-legged grands | clean | clean | clean | clean |
| Drawing | the warm r1 look, softer line | the warm r1 look | crisper, thinner outline, more contrast, the most "Mario" | crisper than Codex, softer than flare |
| Time and cost | ~90 s, $0 | ~100 s, $0 | ~60 s, ≈ $0.04 by the ledger's token estimate | ~60 s, ≈ $0.04 by the ledger's token estimate |
Shipped 2026-09-23: "ok great let's go with the gpt-image-2.5-flare version, route this in." The flare render is the Conservatory's plate at 2×; Adventure lands there for everyone under the adventure_world knob, with the Grand Concert Hall the one exempt venue. The record is in docs/notes/one-room-lab.md.
Claude's read before the pick: on a room spec gpt-image-2.5 and Codex are at fidelity parity (six of six changes each, nothing hallucinated, nothing dropped), so the choice is drawing and layout. The Codex edit is the safe plate: it is the B you picked with the six changes and nothing else moved. If you prefer the crisper 2.5 line, sunburst kept B's layout (bulletin front-left, programme right of the stage) and flare moved the bulletin to the front-right. Whichever you pick ships at 2× as the plate, with a night pass after.
Ten things that make one room feel inhabited with two real players and a handful of bots. Each is buildable on what exists; none needs new art beyond the plate.
A bot "sits" at the room's grand and it plays a real recorded performance from the performances table, through the same path the Rotunda's open grand already uses for hall music. A name pill over the piano says who is playing. When a real player presses Play now, they take the seat and everyone hears them.
The NPC sprite sets are idle-only (five facings). The seventeen player bases carry full eight-way walk cycles, so the bots that walk are "other pianists" dressed from those, and the named cast (rivals, the teacher, the host) stands at its station and turns to face you.
Every bot has a day: practise, cards, supper, listen, leave, return. Two or three are moving at any moment, never all of them, so the room has a rhythm instead of a shuffle. A bot that leaves through the door comes back later with a line about where it went.
The critters' "notice" mechanic, indoors: a rival walks up to you and offers a piece at your level, one click to play, free to decline, never more than once every few minutes. This is the single mechanic the measured 9% was missing: the world never handed them a piece.
Bot lines quote the feats feed ("someone just cleared Für Elise at 92%"), the notice board's bounty, the next recital's countdown and the leaderboard. Nothing invented about real people, ever; a bot's own claims are about itself.
Hourly recitals and three-hourly bot tournaments already run. Five minutes before one, the bots drift to the stage and sit; after it they applaud and disperse. A player sees a crowd form and understands the room has a schedule worth coming back for.
The night-plate renderer gives the room its evening; at night the ghost cast appears at the far piano, plays, and vanishes at the hour. Night in the city is already a setting, so this costs one render.
After any run played from the room, yours or a replay, the seated bots emote (👏 bubbles + the applause sample). The chat reactions and the wave already exist; the room only adds who claps.
Low murmur, cutlery, a clock, a fire, rain at the window after dark. The zone-music rotation is keyed by town id, so the room gets its own set without touching the player's own piano bus.
One room on one global channel means three people online are three people visible, standing near each other, whereas today three people are spread across eleven rooms and four fields. Presence per town already works; the room only has one town.
| Piece | What it is |
|---|---|
| The plate | The picked render at 2× (3072 × 2048), a night render through the night-plate tool, a painted walk mask plus polygons, hotspots and door spots authored in the mask editor. Any defect in the render (a leg, a corner) is a re-roll on Codex, free. |
| Hotspots → what exists | Every station maps to a handler that already exists in the world shell: the saloon ladder, Play now on the grand, Free Play, Frau Adler, the theory games, the shops, the wardrobe, the composer's desk, mail, the notice board, the recital programme, the tournament board. One new hotspot kind, act:<name>, routes furniture into the NPC-action switch so nothing needs a person standing beside it. |
| The lock | A knob read by the world shell: every entry loads the room, doors out toast "the city opens as the tour grows", the travel map's pins grey, the ledger's World tab lists the room's stations instead of the city's districts. The saloon ladder keeps gating exactly as today; the rivals simply stand in the room. |
| bots.js | N bots on player bases with schedules between named spots, lines from data, the piano seat, the crowd before a recital, applause after a run. One module, one config per concept. |
| Tests | A headless recipe in temp/pw: spawn, click every pin and assert what opens, the lock on every door, a bot at the piano, and the analytics stubbed. |
| Effort | A, B and G are the smallest: every station exists as a handler. C adds the door-visit system (guests arriving with a piece). D adds the hour rhythm. E adds the filling boxes and the programme call. F puts critters indoors, which the enemy spawner has never done. |
Decided 2026-09-23: Lionel picked B, named The Conservatory, with a second grand on the stage, the sword, the chess and card tables from D, a recital programme by the stage and the bulletin as the games board. Round 2 above holds the revised renders. What follows is the round-1 reasoning, kept for the record.
G, the Salon, with A's rival ladder as its spine. It is the only fiction in which two real players and five bots in one room feel right rather than sparse: an evening party is supposed to be a small circle. The piano is the physical centre and the chairs around it are the audience, so "perform" and "listen" need no explanation; the duel corner, the card room, the library, the supper table and the dressing corner hold every activity in one hall without a wall between them, so the fit-the-room zoom shows the whole game at once; and it is the true Vienna of 1830 (the Schubertiade), so the world stays coherent with what is built. Build cost is the smallest tier. Name it The Music Room or The Soirée, not "the salon": one letter from "the saloon" is a support ticket.
Runner-up: B, the Academy hall. The most legible metaphor a beginner can meet (a lesson, a practice stall, an exam, an honour board), the natural home of the learning plan's timetable and the pupil roster, and the brightest plate. It wins if the data says players want to be taught more than to perform; it loses the party. If picked, call it The Conservatory and leave the headmaster game its name.
A is the safe scale-up of what works and the darkest room to spend a day in. C is the most charming and the worst for other players. E is the best stage and the worst first screen. F is the best painting and is a small town, which is the thing being retired. D is beautiful and hides the game.
Verdicts go in the Design Gallery round: ★ picked is the build order; ❤ and 👍 are notes.