Launched this week
Finish the Story
A personal website you can play inside Halo 3’s Guardian
30 followers
A personal website you can play inside Halo 3’s Guardian
30 followers
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.
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.