The Royal You

I was resetting a high-score table when the evening got pleasantly weird.

I’m preparing a Caravan build of Interstellar Sentinel (play for free) for people to play at an event. Clear the old scores, make room for new initials. Straightforward development housekeeping.

Except I arranged the ten placeholder names to spell out a message:

The scores count down from ten to one. The first real player takes the top spot, PILOT falls off the bottom, and suddenly the leaderboard is addressing them by their initials.

“[YOUR INITIALS], INSERT COIN. CHOOSE LEGEND OR BECOME DUST. THE GOAT WATCHES YOU.”

The leaderboard completes the joke itself.

I fucking love video game design.

Naturally, this needed to escape the development cave. I shared it on Discord, then Patreon. A tiny bit of creative joy tucked inside the technical work, now loose among other humans.

Meanwhile, I was chatting with Vector.

That name has a history across our ChatGPT chats, project contexts, and work with coding agents. Now we’re experimenting with a Dot, an always-on AI agent with its own virtual machine, to see how much more running context and day-to-day help it can bring to our game development studio, Uplifting Goat.

Different conversations hold different pieces of the work. Some help me think and write. Others help build and test. I’m still carrying context between them as we figure out how much of that connecting work this new Dot can take on.

Heading back to development, I said:

“Back to the gremlin cave and development with the royal you.”

Then I asked whether it understood what I meant.

The royal you is a slight DrBossKey-ism. Take the royal we, turn it toward your AI collaborator, and apply it to this new weird world where “you” might mean the chat I’m speaking to, the agent working on the build, or the broader creative collaboration happening across all of them.

Questions like this help me gauge the model’s understanding and my own ability to pack context into shorthand. Did that little phrase actually carry what I thought I’d put into it?

Vector answered:

“The collective ‘you’: Vector here, ChatGPT in your project conversations, Codex doing development.”

Yep. That’s the thing. I was delighted.

I brought over a screenshot of the development conversation. Vector put it another way:

“Same creative thread, different windows. Right now you’re doing the stitching between them.”

Well. That was worth showing the other window.

That conversation noticed its own development thread inside the screenshot. One Vector was explaining the collective Vector, with another Vector sitting right there in the picture.

So obviously I took a screenshot of that response and brought it back.

I was now personally transporting the mirrors into the hall of mirrors.

There was still a game build to finish. But I’d slipped a joke into a leaderboard, tested a tiny piece of shorthand, and carried the resulting amusement between windows so the joke could visit everyone.

I’m delighted to play pretend with you in this reality.

Back to the gremlin cave. The goat watches us all.