Hex & Bone

Inspiration

Inspired, in style, by the original "Gauntlet", and more modernly, games like "Tower Fall". I've always enjoyed tower defense games, and took some game design inspirations from "Plants vs Zombies", "Guns Up!", and a Warcraft III tower defense mod I used to play back in the day.

What it does

In the game, you are a "Hex Mage", you must defend the land from the invading undead with your magic. Place sentries and use your Hex spell to defeat the waves of skeletons (and worse). The game is tap to play, on one screen with no swiping or scrolling, with a single game taking between 7 and 10 minutes. Prototype is designed for bite-sized play while waiting in line or trying to kill 10 minutes.

How we built it

Claude Opus 5, chat interface entirely. I never once even looked at the code, Claude handled it all while I simply designed the game, play-tested, and directed the changes and adjustments.

Challenges we ran into

This was the easiest game build I've ever done, and I've done a few. Coding is always the trickiest part for solo game builds, because I'm not a coder, but this time was different. There were hardly any issues or problems, and when there were, the bugs were squashed in minutes. This game went from ideation to completion in 20 days, which is... insane. Now, obviously, the polish is mediocre, but 1 person, an entire game (including sfx and music), in 20 days? I think the only challenge is wrapping my head around it, how easily that process went.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

That I did it nearly 100% in the Opus5 chat interface, on a $20 Claude plan, in 20 days.

What we learned

As always with this type of project involving AI, I learned more about how to direct and prompt it better. I'm convinced more than ever that people with high vocabulary and language skills will do best with directing and prompting AI toward successful endeavors.

What's next for Hex & Bone

This game was actually designed as a full game, but this demo here is only a single level experience. What's next for it? That's not up to me.

Built With

• claude
• three.js