Three Hammers: Beneath the Mountain is a single-player real-time strategy campaign in the shape of the games I grew up on. Warcraft II's 2D presentation and pace; Warcraft III's heroes, mission variety and character-driven story. It is set during the War of the Three Hammers, the dwarven civil war between the Bronzebeard, Wildhammer and Dark Iron clans.
You play the commander of an original mixed-clan mining hold. Three shared missions open the campaign, then you choose an allegiance, and each clan route runs five missions to its own ending. Base building, resource gathering, army production and combat are the core of every mission, with rewarding individual-unit control on top.
What it is built on
The game runs on Stratagus, the open-source engine behind Wargus, with the engine pinned and patched only where a mission needs it. Everything the player sees and hears is made for this project: no sprite, sound or voice comes from Warcraft's files. Pixel art is generated with PixelLab and OpenAI image models under direction, then reviewed at actual play size and in motion, and a lot of it is rejected.
The rules we set first
- Missions target 15 to 20 minutes of active play, and only a timed human playtest counts as proof.
- Full mouse-and-keyboard RTS control, with micro that matters.
- Every mission opens with an illustrated, narrated briefing.
- A working visual map builder, used to author the missions themselves.
- Offline Windows play, with macOS as an early feasibility target.
- One component at a time: specified, built, reviewed, integrated, verified, then the next.
The project is built by me with AI agents. One coordinating model designs, reviews and integrates; developer models build each bounded piece in its own lane and hand back evidence. The harness keeps receipts for everything. This log is the readable version of those receipts.