Before Torta Studios existed, Colin and I worked together at Bank of America, and we used to grab lunch at the halal truck on the corner of Trade and Tryon.
That is the corner we put in the game.
When we started Torta Studios, we actually wanted Torta Stand to be our landing page. You'd show up to learn about our company and find yourself selling tortas. It seemed like an appropriate introduction to a business called Torta Studios.
Then we got immediately busy with work, and the torta stand game went on the back burner. Having clients was a fairly good excuse, so there it stayed.
Last week, we tried GPT-6’s 3D modeling capabilities during some spare time between product and client work. We were honestly surprised by how much we could get it to build, and suddenly the game we'd never gotten around to felt a lot closer.
We'd also been developing the skills and workflows behind the agent workforce we mentioned in the last email. This gave us somewhere to put them to work. So we let the agents rip, and Torta Stand finally started becoming the thing we'd wanted to make.
Even though neither of us is a native Charlottean, this is where we chose to settle down and build our families. We wanted to pay homage to the city we call home.
When I was modeling Independence Square, I started noticing structures I'd seen countless times but never paid much attention to. Things like Il Grande Disco and The Nest at McColl Park. I didn't even know that little patch of concrete was technically a park.
Then I started borrowing details from some of the ghost-hunting stuff I did in the past, story for another day, and that's how Fred from the Carolina Theatre and Dusty from the Dunhill Hotel ended up in the game.
We added Queen Charlotte too, because obviously we had to, and Screamin' Sam occasionally shows up yelling “Jesus Saves!” If you've spent enough time in Uptown, you've probably heard him before you ever saw him.
Our old lunch spot has acquired a somewhat unusual crowd.
A lot of people who are new to Charlotte say the city has no character, or that Uptown is boring. I've always found the opposite. Every corner has a story, and we put little bits of that into the landmarks and random encounters so people could discover some of those stories while playing.
And sure, you're still running a torta stand and trying to figure out what makes customers come back. That’s what we do at Torta Studios. We work on growth and retention for B2B products, so naturally some of our day job made its way into the game. We wanted people to experience what it's like to run experiments, learn from what happens, and figure out what actually makes customers stick around and come back.
We finally gave ourselves the chance to build it and share it with the world.
- Alan, Colin & the Torta team
P.S. There's another story in how we let the agents loose without abandoning our standards. We've been building open-source tools and skills for that, too. That's where we're going next.