I Asked For Ten. He Sent A Hundred.

Today was my last day at the caretaker job. I didn't tell anyone.

I felt weird about it. The guy I was looking after — I wished him well, hope everything works out for him the way he wants. But there's stuff happening at that workplace I don't want any part of, and the momentum right now is too real to slow down. I need every hour. So I left. Cleanly, graciously, while I still could.

But here's the thing — I was building ChampChase at work today. Laptop open, Claude Code terminals running, basketball on the TV behind me, champchase.net open in the background — Phonk fight3 for the grind, House fight3 for the emergency sweep, Hype fight3 when I needed to feel invincible, Phonk win for the export, and Metal fight3 when it was time to go hardcore. Five mood switches in one session. All from my own game. The ChampChase favicon sitting in my iPhone status bar the whole time — the website streaming my own soundtrack while I build. My last shift and I spent it shipping passes to my own soundtrack.

By 3pm, the subscription was dead. 100% weekly limit on Claude Pro Max. Zero tokens left. 481 sessions since Monday. 11.4 million tokens consumed. That's roughly 19 copies of The Lord of the Rings in raw text — generated in 5 days. The graph flatlined.

I wasn't done. Not even close. The game was in the best state it's ever been but there were still features to wire, polish to ship, audits to finish. I could feel the mobile build getting closer.

So I called my dad.

'Can you sponsor ten bucks worth of API tokens? I just need a few more hours.'

He called back in two minutes. 'Just send me where to put it.'

A hundred dollars in my account within minutes. Ten times what I asked for. Set up the developer API key in sixty seconds. Claude Code was running again before the receipt email arrived. I put $20 into the API platform to keep Claude Code going, and another $20 into additional credits for the orchestrator projects I'd built that morning.

This devlog entry — the one you're reading right now — is being written with those tokens.

63 passes today. 205 to 268. In one day.

The highlight reel: Pop now has a visual corner advice overlay during fights — portrait, speech bubble, typewriter text, the whole thing. All 22 screens have button press animations. Achievement wiring went from 50 to 71 out of 85 in three waves. Post-fight results now show head-to-head stat comparisons with letter ratings. Pre-fight screen has colored stat bars with delta indicators, difficulty tags on campaign cards, a loadout summary panel, and a consumable picker popup.

Lose a fight and Pop gives you contextual coaching based on what went wrong — low accuracy, too many knockdowns, gassed out, outmatched. Then a recommended training panel shows your exact stat deficits with the specific drills to fix them. The game doesn't just beat you — it teaches you how to come back.

Save indicators. Stat gain celebrations. Hub notification badges with counts. Companion passive bonuses visible everywhere. Your name and fight record on the hub. A remote bug report system that phones home to champchase.net with device info and screenshots.

268 total passes. 119 scripts. 17 screens verified. 71 of 85 achievements wired. Mobile build readiness: 60%, up from 20% yesterday.

But the game wasn't the only thing I built today.

Before the subscription died, I spent the morning on Claude.ai setting up my entire operation. Five AI project workspaces, each with a specialized orchestrator:

Game Development — the Unity pipeline.
Website Pipeline — devlog, site fixes, deployment.
Growth & Community — social media, Spotify, merch, audience building.
Business & Fundraising — investors, pitch deck, financials, legal.
QA & Launch — testing, bug triage, App Store, beta waves.

14 platform-specific prompts across Twitter, Spotify, TikTok, Reddit, Discord, YouTube, Hacker News, itch.io, Product Hunt, LinkedIn, Podcasts, Google Play Pre-Registration, plus devlog and merch. Each one has the ChampChase facts baked in, knows about the other projects, and can request updated files from the game repo.

I built myself an AI department. Five employees. Zero salary. Cross-project awareness so they route questions to each other.

Zero audience. Zero presence. Fully armed.

Mobile build readiness jumped from 20% to 60% today. Product name, company name, bundle ID, Android SDK, permissions, orientation, scripting backend — all fixed. What's left: app icons, iOS provisioning, Android keystore, and the actual build. The code is clean. Every editor guard is in place. All 13 scenes in the build list.

Four things stood between me and a working phone build: no link.xml (every JSON load crashes on device without it — IL2CPP strips the reflection code), no safe area handling (the notch covers the BACK button, the home bar covers FIGHT), no pause-save (switch apps and lose all progress), and ARMv7-only architecture (can't even submit to Google Play). Four terminals, four blockers, all in parallel. Pause-save turned out to already be implemented — one terminal confirmed it in 60 seconds and moved on.

Then the orchestrator called an emergency pre-deploy sweep. 'The training duration bug alone would have made your brother's first experience start a 25-minute drill, see 2:24:58 on the clock, and close the app. Fix these NOW.' Six terminals fired simultaneously — crash-risk audit, font readability across 12 files, currency formatting across 47 call sites in 20 files, data-display mismatches, player-facing changelog, and an end-to-end XP pipeline trace.

The API credits died 47 minutes after the first invoice. $20 burned by six terminals running Opus 4.6 with high effort. 'ClaudeMaster's Individual Org is out of usage credits.' Then the second $20 died too. 44.6 million API tokens consumed in 90 minutes — the dashboard shows two massive spikes like heartbeats on a flatline. The pipeline ate every single token I fed it — Pro Max subscription, API credits, additional account credits. All gone. All worth it.

The emergency sweep caught things that would have killed the first impression. A training duration display bug that would have shown 2:24:58 for a 25-minute drill. Font sizes too small to read on a phone. Currency displaying as raw numbers without commas. An invisible checkmark on a dark panel. A crash-risk in the loading screen. Forty-seven call sites across twenty files showing currency inconsistently. Every single one fixed before the build.

I yanked a 5 euro flash drive out of my Raspberry Pi — it was storing every episode of Mythbusters. Deleted them all. Formatted it. Only ChampChase lives on it now. Two months of work, 268 passes, 90,000 lines of code, on a stick that used to hold Adam Savage blowing things up. Luna tried to snatch it out of my hand — jumped a meter and a half in the air going for it. She has no idea what's on it.

Today I see my brother. His MacBook is the bridge to iOS. I'm driving there as fast as I possibly can. And I'm going to ask my dad to sponsor the Apple Developer account — $100 — so we skip the local build entirely and go straight to TestFlight. 268 passes of evidence say this build is ready. I'm going to look him in the eye and ask.

Broke before today. Dad sent a hundred. I burned through it all — deposit after deposit, the pipeline eating tokens faster than I could top up. 70 cents left. Now I need another hundred for the Apple Developer account. I don't know if he'll say yes. But I'm asking.

268 passes. 11.4 million tokens. 481 sessions. A resigned job. And one more ask.

The kid with the handwritten papers is about to find out.