Last night, due to a variety of circumstances, I had a bunch of Claude tokens on my subscription plan to burn. It was late and I was tired. Every moment I spent working on something would translate to a moment less of sleep. So, I decided to hop on the “let’s see what the new model can do” bandwagon:

Make a game (or game-ish) prototype you think I would appreciate. In addition to the guidance in the game-prototypes repo, I’ve included my website for context, where I’ve documented my taste extensively (though quite a lot of that is from when I was a naive, young kid!)

Honestly, all I really wanted out of this was to quarantine the Space Trucking cargo off into sections and build little mini-games around them. Obviously, I’m not making a cooking game, really. But when I asked people what they wanted in Space Trucking, consistently, people wanted cooking and beverage-making for some unfathomable reason. So hey, if that’s what people want, might as well make a list of cargo items and a cooking minigame flowchart.

This was a very 15 minute style of project. I was sitting with Cor at the kitchen table, and we were both working on our laptops. I don’t remember what exactly lead to the conversation we had… But I think we might’ve been watching some game trailers or something to that effect?

Anyway, Cor turns to me and says “what if the musical track that was playing, like, actively influenced the game world?”'

I had a rough first pass at trying to use Opus 5.5 to make a fun game. It wasn’t fun. Maybe we’re past some kind of October inflection point, as Simon Willison puts it, but it’s still hit or miss.

Wow, this one was a long time ago. Storytime!

For a couple of years now (and then extending into some time before I met her), my partner Cor Vous had a dream for a VRChat game. I don’t understand the inner machinations of her mind particularly well, but I have no doubt that many of the finer details are just things she thinks are cool. But, anyway: There was a bit of a problem she was facing that spurred this from being a dream to something we should actively work on: The entire platform was filled to the brim with sloppy, Robloxified idle games of an exceptionally low quality that more or less amount to a bunch of people playing concurrent solitaire without any interaction with each other. And I mean, that’s really sad, you know? No social interaction in a game on the social networking platform we literally get on to socialize!

Unlike most of the games and prototypes here, which began around 2026, Amoeba Rogulike is from all the way back in 2021. It was my first game jam entry! The 7drl. It was ranked 1st based on aggregate metric score, though it was shared with 5 other entries. Still, out of 240 total submissions that year, I was extremely happy with the result.