11-Year-Old + Claude Code = Halloween Game
My 11-year-old wanted to make a game, so I told him to use Claude Code. That seemed like a lot of typing, so I told him to record a voice memo, and feed that to Claude (transcribed locally, voice not uploaded to Anthropic). The result is the game below, which is pretty fun to play!
My kid explained the whole game in a voice memo (in Dutch): a Halloween lab with rooms, pumpkins you smash with a club, and out of each one comes a coin, a better club, or a monster. The rules were theirs too: a skeleton takes one hit, a zombie three, a ghost can only be hit after the wolf has howled, you get a pet with its own special power after every level, and there's a shop between the rooms. A reference picture came along, only to show the perspective (2D, seen at an angle from above).
Claude first asked a numbered list of questions (controls, hearts, number of levels, difficulty, languages, music). Then several AI agents worked in parallel, each on its own part: game rules, monsters and pets, art, menus, and sound. Six of the nine pets were invented by Claude, on request.
Everything is code. No images, no sound files, no libraries: all the art, the three songs, and the sound effects are generated in code.
Automated tests played the game in a browser, and a bot played level 1 over and over to check it wasn't too hard. My 11-year-old played version 1 and came back with a list: fix a glitch in the corners, add twice as many pumpkins, more upgrades (like a 4th pet spot from level 7), monsters that appear on their own, and switches in the settings to turn the music and sound effects off. Done!
Play it here for free: https://pumpkinlab.tomeij.net/ (opens in a new tab) (English & Dutch, should work on touch devices, too)
PumpkinLabpumpkinlab.tomeij.net (opens in a new tab)
The GitHub repo with the code is here: https://github.com/roytomeij/pumpkinlab (opens in a new tab).