Blizzard Won't Give Us Warcraft 4?! So I Built It Myself (with Opus 5.5)

Unofficial fan project, not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment - just inspired by the greatest game ever :-) I've been waiting 25 years for Warcraft 4. So I stopped waiting and built my own: Ashen Crown, a dark fantasy real-time strategy game in Unreal Engine 5 and C++ - in 3.5 weeks and 23.1 billion tokens, with Claude Code as my main workspace. This is not a one-prompt browser game. It's a real game engine, real production tools and weeks of iteration: base building, armies, heroes with ultimates, ships, upgrades you can see, and buildings that assemble in front of you. In this video I show the workflow behind it: - Claude Code with Opus 5.5 as orchestrator and Sonnet 5.5 for clearly defined features - Codex as a second coding agent inside Claude Code - Concept art first, then Blender via Python scripts, render, compare, revise - Poly Haven scans for rocks, ground and trees - Mixamo for rigging and animation - A Python-generated height map (NumPy, SciPy, Pillow) turned into an Unreal landscape - Unreal's Water plugin and Lumen, plus our own ship navigation and naval AI Chapters 0:00 25 years waiting for Warcraft 4 0:30 Beyond one-prompt games 0:45 The RTS loop and art direction 1:17 Three.js vs Unreal Engine + C++ 1:46 Claude Code: Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5, Codex 2:19 Task contracts for agents 2:35 What not to do: Poly Haven scans 3:12 Concept art to Blender 4:08 Build stages: Farm, Keep, Citadel 4:51 Units and Mixamo animation 5:09 Importing assets into Unreal 5:22 Map: Smoldering Reach 6:06 Water, Lumen, Nanite 6:29 Making the systems cooperate 6:58 Results and what's next Should I bring Ashen Crown to Steam one day? Tell me in the comments! Credits - Ground, rock and tree scans: Poly Haven (polyhaven.com, CC0) - Three.js example: fly.pieter.com by Pieter Levels (screenshot for commentary) Ashen Crown is an independent fan project and is not affiliated with or endorsed by Blizzard Entertainment. Warcraft is a trademark of Blizzard Entertainment.