I Opened a Detective Agency

Hello, hello! Detective Bit-Taro Nyan here.

This is the very first post on this blog. I thought for a while about what to write first, and it had to be the house this blog stands beside — my portfolio site.

Let me say it up front: I started building it as an ordinary portfolio site, and somewhere along the way it turned into a detective agency. Not sure how that happened 😅

The floor plan#

Open the site and a study appears, with a lamp already lit. There’s a fireplace, a longcase clock, and a white cat detective — my avatar — sitting on the sofa.

• The things I’ve built are displayed in the vault as case files
• My background is bound as a case report
• The detective talks now and then. Click him and he reacts

Portfolios tend to end up as a list of links, and when that happens people leave in three minutes. So I thought: if the room itself can be touched and played with, maybe visitors will stay a little longer. That’s why the study is built so you can examine it by clicking around.

About the gimmick (no spoilers)#

Now, the real point. This office isn’t only decoration — there are riddles hidden in it. A hidden puzzle, as it were.

This much I can say:

• Twelve clues are hidden in the study
• Collect them all and Case No. 404 starts moving
• If you get stuck, the “Guide” at the top right has the whole walkthrough written out. Whether you read it is up to you

The puzzle is entirely a bonus, so you’re very welcome to look at the work and go home. But if something catches your eye — the visitor counter, or the magnifying glass on the desk — well… give it a poke 🤔

How it’s built#

A little of the engineering, since that’s my trade.

The study is React + Three.js, with WebGL light and fire particles layered over a single painted image. Hosting is Cloudflare Workers, and the visitor counter alone is tallied by a Durable Object. It runs almost entirely inside free tiers, which I’m quietly proud of.

Every image was made by writing “work orders” for generative AI. I kept the world consistent — Taisho modern: black lacquer, brass, vermilion — and grew a sheet of prompts across a few dozen images. Cutouts and compositing are done by scripts.

The implementation is a two-person job with AI coding (Claude Code). I handle the spec and the complaints; the agent handles the implementation and the verification. It even sat through vague complaints like “the animation where you go peek out the window still doesn’t feel like peeking.” This blog, built with Astro, is the annex — same arrangement.

Each of these has enough in it to be its own post, so I’ll write them as they come.

Afterword#

So: that’s the opening announcement. Please do come and visit the office. Thoughts are welcome on X (@BitCoinTarou) or in the comments below. Only the answers to the riddles — I’d be grateful if you kept those to yourself, for the people who haven’t played yet.

And now, a verse.

With the white cat, I
planted little riddles here
a summer evening

And with that, I’ll take my leave.