Devlogs: Building the IP Portal with Claude

This month, we're introducing The Devlogs! It's a new blog series about tech discoveries by members of the Embersail Team, and how it changed the way they view their work. For our first ever entry, we're here with Mars, the Studio Director of Embersail Studios, and this is his account on developing the first ever Studio IP Portal.

The problem

Here's what nobody tells you about running a transmedia studio: the ideas are the easy part. We've got no shortage of those between comics, tabletop, and games. What kills momentum is how good ideas are buried in conversations through Slack and emails. As a Studio Director I was one of the few people who had all of it in my head, and that's a terrible bottleneck. I needed one, systematic place where the team could actually see what was cooking and testers could give me specific, recorded feedback.

The solution

After coordinating with my team and doing research on feedback systems, I decided to make an IP Portal of our own using Claude Code. I used Claude Code to put together our IP Portal, basically a studio front door where ideas get posted, prototypes are one click away, and feedback gets tied to an actual goal instead of floating around as a stray comment. It took less than a day.

I'm not a web developer by trade, I direct products and business operations, so having Claude handle the scaffolding and the plumbing while I focused on what the thing actually needed to do (i.e., What should the team see first, How should feedback get sorted, What does "Ready to test" even mean for us, etc.) was the difference between this existing and this staying a note in my head for another six months.

How the team responded

I showed it to the studio expecting polite nods, but instead I got a flood of questions! People started poking at it immediately: I didn't get"cool tool" comments either but real notes: accessibility stuff I hadn't thought about, feedback on how information was laid out, someone even floated gamifying the whole feedback loop. As a Studio Director, that's exactly the reaction I was hoping for. It meant people cared enough to want it to be better, not just tolerating the new system.

How it felt

Honestly, it felt like the best kind of validation you get in this job. You spend so much time building things you hope people will use, and then you watch a room full of your own team actually pick it up and start shaping it in real time. That doesn't happen often. So when it does, you remember why you like this work.

What stuck with me

The bigger realization for me wasn't about this one tool, it was about what building it unlocked in my head. Watching Claude Code turn an idea into something usable that fast made me realize how much of our production lifecycle has gaps like this just sitting there, unsolved, because nobody had the bandwidth to build the fix. Now I'm looking at this as the start of something for the team.

My real bet is that the future of Embersail looks like a studio full of product owners, not just specialists waiting for direction. Everyone T-shaped in their craft, everyone able to spin up the tool they need, everyone collaborating faster because the friction of "someone needs to build this for me" just isn't there anymore.

Key insights

• The true bottleneck was the lack of one place for the Team to live and get real feedback (on the plethora of ideas we had about games and comics).

• Claude Code let me, a Director, not an Engineer, ship something the studio actually needed in under a day. I was able to solve a lingering problem for the Studio very quickly.

• If people start improving your tool the moment they see it, you built the right thing.