Alpaca Music Festival

Inspiration

We wanted to try a tower-defense game without the usual combat: no enemies to kill, no health to whittle down to zero. Alpacas at a music festival, getting bored and wandering toward the exit, felt like a natural, low-stakes twist - instead of towers that deal damage, the player deploys concession stands and street performers whose whole job is to keep the crowd entertained.

What it does

Alpacas spawn at the festival stage and walk toward the exit gate, each carrying a boredom bar. Concession stalls (face painting, ice cream, a hot dog cart, and more) automatically fire themed items at the nearest bored alpaca, chipping down its boredom until it turns around happy. Four tap-charged performances (a fire juggler, a unicyclist, a bubble artist, and a drum circle) pause alpacas in specific stretches of the path so stalls can land more hits. If three alpacas reach the gate still bored, the wave is lost; coins earned from happy alpacas fund new stalls, restock supplies, and buy fire-rate upgrades.

How we built it

Made with Claude Code, Google Flow, and Photoshop. According to Claude, the game is Plain HTML5, CSS, and JavaScript - no framework, no bundler, no external dependencies. Separate source files (template, stylesheet, script) are hand-edited during development and assembled by a small custom Node build script into one self-contained, unminified index.html for submission. All art is illustrated and hand-positioned against native map coordinates; audio runs on the lightweight ZzFX synth library rather than sample files, keeping the whole build tiny and fully offline.

Challenges we ran into

Designing a game that takes place at a music festival meant pushing ourselves to create game mechanics that feel authentic to that world. We went through several iterations of stalls, performances, and distractions that would fit naturally into the festival environment.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

All 8 concession stalls have real, independent targeting and firing, not just placeholder art. All 4 ability performances have their own tap-charge meters, zone-restricted pause effects, and first-use explainer popups. The wave system, coin economy, and win/lose thresholds are fully wired end to end, and the whole game runs and scales cleanly in a fixed portrait layout on real phones, including a rotate-to-portrait guard for touch devices.

What we learned

Communicating with Claude using images in addition to text is very effective. Claude is great at analyzing images, which means that showing it a map with the placement of buttons or waypoints speeds things up while keeping your design very precise.