Coral Kind

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  Player choosing coral to place

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  Player watching corals merge and increase Reef Health

Inspiration

I'm inspired by the work of coral reef restoration divers, who are helping to combat climate change below the water, where it's least visible to most of us. Since June is World Ocean Month, I wanted to design a game that lets players live the fantasy of scuba divers restoring the reef and seeing the beauty grow before their eyes.

What it does

Coral Kind brings farming simulator mechanics underwater, while adding a strategic layer to the placement and interaction of different coral types which makes the farming loop more deeply engaging.

How we built it

The written design artifacts are entirely my own writing, although I went back and forth with Claude to iteratively review and improve the clarity of the documentation. While AI is useful for writing, I believe the most genuine and unique facets of a design are human-written. The visual artifacts, including the Gameplay Mockups, are composite images built from AI-generated assets with Figma-designed overlays and UI on top.

Challenges we ran into

Guiding AI to produce game concept screenshots is difficult when the screenshots involve more than just an environment, e.g. the hex tile grid in Coral Kind that players grow the coral on. Therefore I had to get halfway there with Gemini for the base environment, then layer on the grid tiles and corals in Figma.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

I'm proud that the gameplay mockups look almost exactly how I'd imagined the game from conception, and feel like they could be playable. Additionally, the Player Journey Map is visually compelling and easy to digest - I think it does a great job of telling the story of a player's first 15 minutes.

What we learned

Design in isolation is hard. I'm used to building a game much earlier in the process, and designing alongside the MVP, so that I can play and iterate in real time. Preparing a full design spec up front feels unnatural, but challenges me to plan ahead and put myself into a new player's shoes to image what obstacles they may face, so that I can design solutions.

What's next for Coral Kind

Coral Kind is a game I want to play - I enjoy farming games, and think the added strategy of coral interaction, plus the moment-to-moment gameplay of capturing sea life photos, sounds satisfying and rewarding. Since the design spec is ready to be built and I'm eager to stay up to date with advancements in AI coding, I'd like to try building the game as a web app via Claude Code and see if I can get the MVP playable. Beyond that, I'm keen to find out more about Horizon Worlds' upcoming AI generation capabilities, and try to use them to build this game.

Built With

• figma
• gemini