# Linjiang Chronicles — Life Sim Built by AI Agents (Godot)

> Linjiang Chronicles (一纸青云·临江志) — a 305-event ancient-life simulation for iPhone, built by AI agent teams in Godot. Systems, numbers, and honest development status.

Source: https://toolpantry.app/gamedev/linjiang-chronicles

## About

A premium ancient-life simulation for iPhone — take the imperial exams, manage a granary through flood season, and live with the consequences of 711 decisions. Built in Godot by AI agent teams, with every branch machine-audited.

## Quick answer

What is it? A reading-first life simulation set in a river county of ancient China. You steer one life across 8 chapters — scholarship, family, disaster relief, and twenty possible endings — through a paper-and-vermilion phone UI designed for one-handed play.

## The design idea: decisions you can read

Most mobile "choices" games hide their systems behind timers. Linjiang goes the other way: every decision shows its cost before you commit. A choice page is a reading page — the plan, the receipts, and the consequences are all on the paper. The UI contract is explicit: selecting never executes; only the vermilion seal at the bottom commits. Two adjacent options always fit on screen as fixed-width cards, and every prep step is reachable in a tap — no hidden menus, no forced scroll-hunting on a 320-pixel-wide phone.

## Systems worth knowing

### Three life routes, one county

You pick a path through county life — scholarship first among them — and the game tracks material holdings, health, reputation, and the two long-arc relationships (a magistrate's aide and a merchant's daughter are the current pair). Routes cross: an exam decision can cost you the grain you needed for flood relief.

### The granary problem (chapter six)

Chapter six turns disaster relief into a finite-inventory puzzle: five household funds buy twelve sacks of grain, once. First distribution splits into three outcomes; the second wave pressures you to save workers or sell stock. The autumn-flood relief requires that four sacks *actually remain* — the game audits your receipts, not your intentions. No amount of reputation or rest can conjure grain; old debts and damaged records have their own handover exits.

### Evidence-grade content pipeline

All 305 events render headlessly in CI. A balance run walks the full event graph and reports where the economy dead-ends. Every content state has a lifecycle — drafted, validated, integrated, rendered, runtime-seen, manually-played, accepted — and nothing is claimed as done before its stage is proven. The current honest status: the single-run content is estimated at roughly 10 hours per route by simulation models, and **the "20+ hours" goal is explicitly not yet accepted**.

## What the agents actually did

- **Content at scale:** events, branches, receipts, and endings drafted as structured data, then validated by graph walks — the parts of a life-sim that are pure volume.
- **UI iteration under constraints:** six layouts across four phone sizes (320→430px) plus large-type mode, verified with same-state before/after captures.
- **Runtime evidence:** real-time recordings of actual builds reviewed frame-by-frame before features count as done — the pipeline from our [flagship guide](https://toolpantry.app/how-we-build-games-with-ai-agents.html).

## Honest status board

| Area | State |
|---|---|
| Core loop & save system | Playable in Godot, headless-verified |
| All 305 events / 20 endings | Render clean, machine-audited |
| Art & audio | Candidate stage — final human acceptance pending |
| 20-hour content claim | Not accepted (simulation estimates ~10h/route) |
| Device testing & release | Not started — iPhone build pipeline next |

## Notes

Godot 4.6 · iPhone portrait · premium (buy once) · no ads, no gacha, no live-service hooks.

## FAQ

**When can I play it?**

Not yet — it is in active development. The complete single-player flow runs in Godot today, and iPhone release is the next milestone. Playable demos will appear in this lab first.

**Is it really 305 events?**

Yes, and they all render in automated tests. What is not yet proven is the total playtime : simulation models estimate roughly ten hours per route, and the team's own bar is twenty. The gap is content depth per branch, not event count.

**Why build a life sim with AI agents?**

Life sims are almost pure content volume — hundreds of interlocking events where the hard part is consistency, not rendering. That is exactly the work agent pipelines are good at: generate, validate against the graph, and record evidence. See the pipeline guide .