Finish the Story is my first personal website, built as a playable first-person experience inside Halo 3's Guardian - the map where my friends and I spent countless hours growing up. Explore it through quests, photos, and mini-games tied to different memories. I built the entire thing with Astra in one week. The most time-intensive part wasn’t coding - it was deciding which memories belonged where, and what gameplay could bring each one to life while still feeling natural to play.
GPT-6 Astra handled the actual implementation of the site: recreating the Halo 3-style menu, lobby, and Guardian map, then building the first-person controls, quests, mini-games, interactions, audio, UI, and game logic. I mostly focused on the creative direction - what memories to include, where they belonged, what gameplay fit each one, and whether the experience felt right.
Hey Product Hunt,
Guardian was my third place growing up.
After school, my friends and I would get on Halo 3 and hang out in Guardian free-for-all while we waited for everyone to come online. Then we'd play customs or ranked for hours. On weekends, we'd bring our Xboxes and monitors to each other's houses, stay up all night, have LAN parties and play in local tournaments, and talk about getting good enough to play MLG.
I'm not a programmer and have never had a personal website. Recently, I had an hour left before my Codex credits reset, so I prompted Astra to make one. But I didn't want another résumé or portfolio site. I wanted something that was creative, felt authentic to me, and was something that I genuinely enjoyed using myself.
So I asked Astra to recreate the Halo 3 menu + lobby and Guardian as a first-person personal website, with a treasure hunt through different parts of my life. The first version was surprisingly good, so I kept iterating on it for a week.
I built the entire thing with Astra, mostly on Extra High. Toward the end, I switched to Sol Medium for smaller edits since Astra felt like overkill, and Sol handled them well.
The coding wasn't the bottleneck. Most of my time went into the creative decisions: which memories to include, where they belonged in the map, and what interaction or mini-game best represented each one. Basically the feel of the game - did it feel intuitive, natural, and "flow"? That took a lot of thinking, testing, and iteration. AI could not do this well (how could it know what my experiences felt to me?).
One thing I learned: Astra gets dramatically better with good references. I fed it Guardian walkthroughs and callout maps, Halo 3 menus and lobbies, gameplay clips, audio references, and examples from other games whenever I wanted an interaction to feel a certain way. Asking it to invent something from scratch was much less reliable than showing it what "good" looked like.
The first time I walked through the game, heard the Halo 3 theme music, and saw old photos inside a place that felt so familiar, it felt like I was coming back home.
I had a lot of fun and nostalgia making this. I hope you have half as much fun exploring it.
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Did you already have this whole concept in your head before you started?
@jamaal_williams At first, I just had a vague concept that I wanted to create a personal website in The Guardian, but I actually didn't commit to it being first-person or fully interactive. I first didn't know if that was even possible, so I asked Astra to replicate Guardian, and when I found out it could replicate it pretty well with first person movement, I decided, okay, let's do some more with this.
Growing up, my friends and I would get home from school and jump into a Guardian free-for-all with MLG settings while we waited for everyone to come online. Then we'd play customs or ranked for hours. On weekends we'd bring our Xboxes and monitors to each other's houses, stay up all night, and play LANs or local tournaments.
Guardian was basically our third place. It was where we hung out.
This project started almost by accident. I had an hour left before my Codex credits reset and needed something compute intensive to use them on, so I asked Astra to make me a personal site inside Guardian. The first version was good enough that I kept going.
The biggest thing I learned was how much references matter. I gave Astra Guardian walkthroughs and callout maps, Halo 3 menu/lobby footage, gameplay clips, audio references, and examples from other games. When I showed it what I wanted, it was usually very good at recreating it. When I asked it to invent something from scratch, the results were much less reliable.
It was also much better at executing individual ideas than judging the overall experience. It could build a mechanic or interaction quickly, but it couldn't really tell when something felt slow, confusing, badly paced, or just wrong. I ended up doing a lot of playtesting and moving things around by hand.
The first time I walked around with the Halo 3 music playing and saw old photos inside a place I knew by heart was unexpectedly emotional. It felt a little like coming home.
Would especially love feedback on where you got lost, what felt slow or confusing, and which parts were actually fun.
Magic Hour
Magic Hour
Did you already have this whole concept in your head before you started?
Magic Hour
@jamaal_williams At first, I just had a vague concept that I wanted to create a personal website in The Guardian, but I actually didn't commit to it being first-person or fully interactive. I first didn't know if that was even possible, so I asked Astra to replicate Guardian, and when I found out it could replicate it pretty well with first person movement, I decided, okay, let's do some more with this.
Magic Hour
Hey Product Hunt,
A bit of context on why I picked Guardian.
Growing up, my friends and I would get home from school and jump into a Guardian free-for-all with MLG settings while we waited for everyone to come online. Then we'd play customs or ranked for hours. On weekends we'd bring our Xboxes and monitors to each other's houses, stay up all night, and play LANs or local tournaments.
Guardian was basically our third place. It was where we hung out.
This project started almost by accident. I had an hour left before my Codex credits reset and needed something compute intensive to use them on, so I asked Astra to make me a personal site inside Guardian. The first version was good enough that I kept going.
The biggest thing I learned was how much references matter. I gave Astra Guardian walkthroughs and callout maps, Halo 3 menu/lobby footage, gameplay clips, audio references, and examples from other games. When I showed it what I wanted, it was usually very good at recreating it. When I asked it to invent something from scratch, the results were much less reliable.
It was also much better at executing individual ideas than judging the overall experience. It could build a mechanic or interaction quickly, but it couldn't really tell when something felt slow, confusing, badly paced, or just wrong. I ended up doing a lot of playtesting and moving things around by hand.
The first time I walked around with the Halo 3 music playing and saw old photos inside a place I knew by heart was unexpectedly emotional. It felt a little like coming home.
Would especially love feedback on where you got lost, what felt slow or confusing, and which parts were actually fun.