A Crew Among the Stars

• 

  End of Round Stats and Upgrades!

• 

  Level 1

• 

  Level 3

• 

  Main Menu

Inspiration

Crew Among the Stars was inspired by classic tower defense games which made the genre fun, space adventure games, and the style of late-'90s and early-2000s RPGs. I wanted to build a tower defense game where progression meant more than surviving increasingly large waves. You play as A Captain of a space crew thrown into an escalating conflict, meeting new crew members, unlocking new defenses, and gradually discovering that the threat they are fighting may be larger than it first appears.

The goal was to combine the immediacy and strategy of tower defense with the feeling of embarking on a larger space adventure.

What it does

In A Crew Among the Stars, enemies walk a lane toward your ship; you tap platforms to place five kinds of turret, earn coins per kill, and spend spare parts between levels to raise a tower type's rank. There are multiple levels, each with escalating waves and a champion (For demo purposes, there are only 3 in this build). Each crew member carries an ultimate ability: an orbital bombardment, a quick strike, a free tower, a shield, and more!

How we built it

Claude Code in the Claude desktop app, over eight (super long) sessions, with me deciding and the agent building in small verified passes — every change played before the next. It runs using plain JavaScript and Three.js; every creature and turret is primitives assembled in code. Art and music are mine were carefully crafted and generated outside of the project by me!

Challenges we ran into

Playtesting exposed flaws I never would have thought of. There were multiple bugs which arose, and it became difficult at times to wrangle the agents I was using away from crossing the guard rails I set. A major challenge was balancing adding components to the game without going over the sizing limit.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Sticking with this until the end! I started a bit late, but I put in an immense amount of hours trying to make this game as fun and replayable as possible. It felt good to collaborate with the AI while still calling on my creative senses and experience playing video games from a variety of genres.

What we learned

Don't overscope! Test, and test again, and most importantly: when using AI tools, don't completely remove the creative flair that you have as a human. Work with the AI!

What's next for A Crew Among the Stars

In a future update, I plan to add new enemy types, heroes, tower types, maps, and ways to interact with the story, such as cutscenes and light RPG elements! On the technical side, I also hope to introduce higher-fidelity models, environments, animations, and visual effects.

Built With

• claude
• html5
• javascript
• three.js