Tomb Swarm: Khepri’s Curse

Survive an Egyptian tomb overrun by scarabs. Smash bugs to gather coins, craft repairs to keep your health up and your torch burning, and outlast 3 brutal waves of escalating swarms, or be consumed.

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Inspiration

I've always been drawn to Egyptian mythology and the idea of a lone explorer stumbling into something they weren't supposed to find. Khepri, the scarab god of the rising sun, felt like the perfect antagonist to flip. Instead of a symbol of rebirth, the scarabs become the curse. The core question I kept coming back to was: what if the darkness itself was the real enemy, and the bugs were just how it got to you?

What it does

Tomb Swarm is a portrait mode survival shooter where you tap to sling projectiles at scarabs crawling toward your explorer. Every scarab you stop drops coins. You spend those coins at a craft bar to relight your torch, wrap your wounds, or boost your aim. If your torch goes out or the scarabs consume you, the run ends. Survive three escalating waves to escape the curse.

How we built it

Claude handled all the game code as a single-file HTML5 canvas game built for portrait mobile play. The explorer character was designed in Photoshop and Nano Banana 2, generating specific poses and expressions for each game state. Those images went into ComfyUI with LTX 2.5 Image to Video to create looping animations. After Effects handled chroma keying and webm rendering with transparency. VO was recorded live and enhanced through Adobe Podcast for an arcade feel.

Challenges we ran into

LTX 2.5 kept pushing the camera into the character no matter how the prompts were written. Even phrases like "no zoom" triggered movement. The fix was removing all camera language from the positive prompt entirely and placing those terms in the negative prompt only. Fitting the build under 35MB while keeping visual quality was the other major hurdle.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

There is a lot of misunderstanding and pushback around AI, but this project is proof of what becomes possible when you stop fighting it and start collaborating with it. My coding knowledge is very limited, yet I was able to build a fully playable game with a complete resource loop, custom animations, live voice-over, and dynamic game states. That would not have been possible before tools like Claude existed.

What I am most proud of is how AI amplified the skills I already had rather than replacing them. As a professional motion graphics artist, I brought my knowledge of design, animation, and visual storytelling to this project, and AI filled in the gaps where I had limitations. The result is a game that visually holds its own against any mobile title out there. That is what AI collaboration looks like at its best.

What we learned

AI tools work best when each one is treated as a specialist. Claude for logic and systems, ComfyUI for motion, Photoshop for composition, Adobe for audio. The most valuable skill was learning to prompt for what you do NOT want, which turned out to matter as much as prompting for what you do want.

What's next for Tomb Swarm: Khepri's Curse

A multi-tomb campaign with unlockable explorer abilities, a deeper crafting tree, and boss scarab encounters unique to each tomb, building toward a roguelite loop where every run through the tomb network feels distinct. I'd like to keep pushing the visuals too and tighten up animations I'd like to expand on further.

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