By Sloane Vega & Lisbeth Hackman
So David had an idea. And the entire staff braced themselves for the worst. What would it be? His rocket powered Heelys, again? Banana pudding bubble gum? No, thank goodness. This idea was actually do-able.
He wanted a real place to hang out with his book characters between stories. A headquarters, with a tour. What could possibly go wrong?
Quite a lot, it turned out. Here are the highlights.
Build 1: a box with a view
The first build was a lobby, a hangar, a beach and a roof, plus a lot of grey. It worked, and the bones were there: Three.js running right in your browser, with nothing to download. But it looked like a level someone had described over the phone.
The loop
Every improvement came from the same loop. David played each build. Sloane wrote a numbered build brief, and she enjoyed rejecting work. So much. Claude Code and Codex built each brief on its own branch, wrote the tests, and opened it for review. A robot played the whole tour after every change. Nothing merged without approval.
The specialists piled in too. Higgsfield shot the cinematics, Meshy turned concept art into 3D models, and Mixamo made those models walk instead of float. Blender handled the fussy cleanup, and Suno did the music. David supplied the real sound effects, right down to the engine wind-down when the drop ship lands.
The trials (and tribulations)
The hellhounds. The first hounds were fine at being scary but bad at dying. Now an energy bolt from the Merc III charges for about two seconds, then lifts the fire right off the hound’s body before it bursts. Getting that to feel good took more passes than we’ll admit to.
Sound, sound, and more sound. The cargo bay alone has a timed sequence: engine wind-down, latches, the upper door, ramp hydraulics, and a distant Firebird screech. The hounds got wing flaps. The Mystery Lever got a scream trimmed to just over a second, because comedy is timing.
The drop-ship countdown. The roof finale runs on a three-minute clock. Liftoff is synced to the spoken word “launch.” If you miss the ship, you’re disintegrated, and the card says so.
Kit learned to talk. In late October, Kit Ryder finally started speaking when you walk up to her, the same way Moose, Peanut and Arnold do. It was a small change, and it made the Archives feel alive.
Hosting and lock-down. Lis fought the web host’s CDN, the caching and the lock-down until the videos streamed, the tour stayed private for testers, and then it opened to everyone. (Lis: “We do not speak of the caching.”)
The actors had notes. They, uh… made us read the lines over and over. Someone called HR. Denied.
The explainer
Want the whole thing in under a few minutes, starring the crew? Here you go.
Fifteen builds, ten testers
Fifteen-plus builds, every one shaped by real play. Then ten beta testers went through it level by level, hellhound by hellhound, and found the things we’d stopped seeing. Their notes went straight into the final builds. (Thank you, brave souls. Arnold still hasn’t forgiven you.)
The things we’re proudest of are the small ones. Sloane gets crankier the more often you come back. There’s a toilet in the game that we were told not to touch, so it stays.
“It was just so great to see this vision come to life room by room, character by character, death trap by death trap. Haha. And as an author, it’s a thrill to be able to let people interact with our characters outside of the books themselves. That’s pretty cool.”
— David Acuff
November 1: boarding
On November 1, 2026, the BravoBay HQ Tour went live for everyone, along with the new site, at thebravobay.com/hq. Click once and you’re on the drop ship. Land on the roof, meet the crew, poke the lever (don’t poke the lever), and try to make it out alive.
If you do make it, the trophy page will thank you for travelling dangerously. Your luggage wasn’t so lucky.
Time to book your tour, squib.
We’ve got a good feeling about this.
Sloane & Lis
Missed the beginning? Meet the playtesters in Ten Brave Souls: The BravoBay HQ Tour Testers Are In. Then take the BravoBay HQ Tour yourself, and join the newsletter for what comes next.
