GLASSWRIGHT

Twelve commissions. One season. A shop you can lose.

A patron arrives with a hole in a wall and an opinion. A form to fill, a fee, a budget, a deadline, and something they want — light, or mourning, or their guild's colour leading the window, or simply that you not spend their money.

You choose a tracery, a palette, how finely to lead it and how to finish it. The workshop cuts the glass, the kiln takes its days, and the patron judges what actually came out — not what you picked off a menu.

There is no picture of a window anywhere in this game

Every window you see — on this page, on the title screen, on the bench, in your gallery — is computed at the moment you look at it, from 45 hand-authored traceries, 12 glass palettes, 10 window forms, 5 lead densities and 5 finishes. No texture, no atlas, no sprite, no AI-generated illustration. Move one slider and the glass is cut again in front of you.

That is also why the patrons are hard to please. When you fire a window the workshop measures the real thing: how bright it reads, how much contrast holds it together at a distance, which glass ended up covering the most of it, how many pieces were cut, and what they cost at today's prices. Those measurements are what the patron reacts to. You cannot satisfy a brief by choosing the right item from a list — you have to make a window that comes out the way they asked.

The workshop is a business

• The glass market drifts every season. Cobalt and gold ruby were genuinely dear; the same design is cheap one month and dear the next.
• Wages are real. A finely leaded window takes more days, and every day costs coin. A window that costs more to build than it pays is how a shop is lost — and the ledger tells you before you fire, not after.
• Crude work is noticed. Barely leading a window is the cheapest thing you can do and every patron can see it.
• A refusal still costs the glass. That is where the risk lives.

What you actually decide

Tracery — wheels, foils, lattices, crosses, foliage, bands and medallions, each a genuinely different partition of the glazing. The guild shares a new pattern after every window you deliver, so no two seasons teach you the same book.

Palette — twelve real workshop disciplines, from Chartres Blue to Cistercian Grey. Sets the colour and the bill at once.

Lead — how finely the glass is cut. More pieces, more days, more coin.

Finish — set jewels into the border, spin a crown rondel for the centre, fire silver stain onto white glass, or run a grisaille vine across the whole light. Every one is a real fourteenth-century decision.

The demo

The free browser version is the first four of twelve commissions — enough to learn every control, see a window generated and scored more than once, and decide honestly whether you want the rest. Progress saves automatically. The full season is the paid download on this page, and it ends with the West Window.

Compatibility

Browser demo: any modern desktop browser. Mouse only. Sound starts on your first click — there is no autoplay.
Paid download: Windows desktop build, all twelve commissions.

AI disclosure, in full

Code — yes. Every line is AI-written.
Graphics — yes, though not in the way that tag usually means, and the difference is the whole product: no image file is used for any window. They are drawn by the game's own code, which ships as readable source beside it. The tag reads yes because that code was AI-written. (The stone wall and the parchment are real texture files — generated by the same code, not by an image service.)
Sounds — no. Every sound effect is synthesised live in the browser. The two music tracks were composed as note data and rendered through oscillators — no sample, no soundfont, no library track, no AI music service.
Text & dialogue — yes. The patrons' briefs and the interface copy.

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