A dark fantasy story told as cutscenes inside a real 1997 tactics engine. Not a finished game. One scene at a time, failures included.

• Not a game you will play. No download, no release, no ROM. Story cutscenes, published as videos.
• Likes decide speed. The most liked videos and story threads get developed further and faster. We read the like counts before every batch, same as the votes.
• You steer it. Votes and comments pick what gets built next. Super Chats and messages change the story. Donations keep it alive: they pay for the AI hours behind sprites, maps and scenes. Nothing is sold and no files ship. Every signal goes into one ledger that is read before every batch.
• Possible later: a small playable slice, about one fiftieth of a game, on this website. That is the honest ceiling, and it comes after Episode 1.
• Why it exists: AI does the art, the voices, the video and most of the code. What it cannot do is work for free, and this project eats quotas.

Status, September 12, 2026

Working, verified in the real engine:

• Opening scene at the Pod Village table, 18 lines of dialogue
• Eight-rider departure, all crew mounted, including Clav the skeleton
• Raid test with real, memory-verified damage
• Triste: one complete character sprite set (walk, attack, hit, fall, recover)

Not done:

• TupGee sprite rejected (background bleed), twelve characters exist only as prompts
• Raid cart props designed on paper, not built
• One portrait shows the wrong face; the unarmed monk fighting style is not in yet

Build logs

• Log 01 Eight months of failing, then a first real frame
• Log 02 Eight riders, one raid, and a sky that would not change
• Log 03 One sprite took all night
• Log 04 Voices: first pass with stand-ins
• Log 05 Where we are, September 12, 2026

The Making of Evil Ice, thirteen episodes, one per day until September 24

• Making 01 What it is, and what it is not
• Log 06 Voices, take two (Fish Audio voice models)

What it is. January, the night it worked. The humor is bad. March, three AIs, no answer. April, the naming screen. The dead months. The forensic review. One night, three scenes. The sprite night. The tools. Hours and money. The roadmap. The configs. Each ends with what the next step costs.

Posted on YouTube, TikTok and Instagram.

Batch 001, September 12: generated through the ChatGPT subscription from a terminal, with the accepted Tristan portrait and an original monk sprite attached as references. These are style candidates. The usable in-engine version is built by editing the real 32x48 portrait and the native sprite atlas, one fragment at a time.

Vote on the design. TupGee: A, the standing candidate look. B, the native portrait look. C, something else, say what in the message. Use the vote form below with the question "TupGee design".

Generation failure rate so far: 9 logged attempts, 4 usable. Three driver bugs in one night, all fixed. Every failure becomes a build-log segment.

Eight months, most of them failures. Every entry has a making-of episode. Dates and numbers come from the project's own git history, session logs and receipts.

• January 26, 2026, 8:21 PM
  First screen recording: a character walks, turns, talks. Ten commits that night. Setback found later: it was the game's own Igros Castle scene playing by accident.
• January 27 to 30
  A commit declares all thirteen scenes coded. None ever played. Carlos: "Stop. The humor is bad." Rejected draft. One rule survived: nobody answers Clav.
• March 16
  Multi-AI audit. GPT-4.1 and DeepSeek disagree, Gemini returns an expired key. Two specs that contradict each other, two encoding tables, three builds each called the winner.
• April 17
  174 scripts archived into one builder. Every build stuck on the naming screen. Same afternoon: the project fakes it with still frames and the game font.
• May 8
  Transfer scripts to a second machine. Then four months of silence. The tool folder was empty; three downloads were nine-byte Not Found files.
• August 26
  One question restarts it: how was the January recording made? 22 logged hours in August, all reading the wreckage.
• September 7
  The forensic review: fake test suite, a builder that wiped its own patches, an intro-skip patch that corrupted the disc checksums. Same day: new builder, 23 tests, one honest line: "We are broke again."
• September 8, 00:07 to 07:15
  Byte-exact event encoder. First real frame. The full 82-second opening. Eight riders leave the village. A raid with memory-verified damage. Plus a sky stuck on night and rain, fixed with one number.
• September 11
  The sprite night. Painted checkerboards, wrong sizes, floating limbs, one paid API call caught and stopped. 08:08: Triste walks, fights and falls inside the real engine. 13:18: quota at five percent; a whole month of resets burned in one week.
• September 12
  Channels, support page, first five build logs, the making-of series, Fish Audio character voices, the vote ledger. Next: Scene 5, the Don's tax, built with the engine, and TupGee's sprite redo.
• September 12, later
  Every build log after the first scene showed frozen characters. Root cause found: the footage ran on the video's clock instead of the scene's clock, so every later clip sat on its last frame. Fixed, every video re-rendered. The narration is now me, first person, casting each layer onto the scene: let's add some motion, one voice at a time, then the soundtrack. Scene 5, the Don's tax, built in the engine. The soundtrack is ours: about 200 songs made with Suno for an earlier project. In the story they are what Mark0, the bard who stays behind, and the other mystics play.

Logged work since August 26: 80.7 active hours. Running cost: about 700 USD a month in AI subscriptions, shared with other projects. See the roadmap for what comes next and what it costs.

Money, stated plainly

• Today: four AI subscriptions, about 700 USD a month, shared with other projects. In one week this project burned a full month of resets on one 200 USD account.
• Logged work: 80.7 active hours between August 26 and September 12, on top of the January to May attempts that were never measured.
• Support buys accounts dedicated to Evil Ice, so a quota burned elsewhere never stalls this story. Money never buys canon. It buys work and a build log.

Music is a cast member in Evil Ice. Mark0, the bard who stays behind, plays these; the other mystics answer him, and when two of them talk it is a duet. I make the pieces with Suno. About 200 songs exist so far. The ones below are in the scenes or about to be, and the vote form asks which one scores the next scene and which one I should make next.

• The Harp's Tale. Mark0's harp, heard in Build Log 06.
• Mark0 and Darleen: the lovers duet. Harp and cello.
• Mark0 and Karma: the inheritance. Harp and trumpet.
• Battle theme A.
• Echoes of the Brave.
• The Kingdom's Lament.
• Echoes of Eternity.

Evil Ice is community reactive development: what you like, vote for, request and fund is what gets built next, and the most liked threads move fastest. Three ways, all counted in the same ledger: comment the letter under any video, use this form, or write to evilicefft@gmail.com. Paying supporters weigh more; scene requests always get a review.

Character voices come from the Fish Audio voice library. Myron, Fresh and Clav do not have a model yet. If you make or find a Fish Audio voice that fits a character, send the model link to evilicefft@gmail.com or paste it in the vote form message. Accepted voices go into the next scene and you get credited in the build log.

Paid request rules

• Paid requests get reviewed for future scenes. We only add what fits Evil Ice.
• Nothing paid is guaranteed canon. Rejected requests go to the rejected and funny failures archive, credited if you want.
• Every funded item gets a build log, including the failures on the way.
• Super Chats and Super Thanks on YouTube count as support and as votes.

• Not a finished game and not a game release. Story cutscenes in development.
• Fan project. Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or connected to Square Enix. All donations support the creator's time and tools; no game assets, discs or files are sold or distributed.
• No ROMs, BIOS files, or modified discs are distributed here or anywhere.
• Characters are satire. Dialogue is fiction and not a statement by any real person. Character voices are generated from the Fish Audio voice library.
• Rights holders and anyone with a concern: write to evilicefft@gmail.com and it gets handled.