Since the triathlon (Split 08), the running had been quiet. The Great Reset and Challenge 75 were both about to start, and had been for a while. What I did instead was build games. Three of them, as it turned out.

Claude Code had been working away on the Mac mini, which could carry on without me, and which is also how this blog gets put together. So when the idea arrived, there was somewhere to put it. It arrived, as most bad ideas do, in a WhatsApp group.

Little Wars

After a recent game night, a mate sent a message. Wouldn't it be great to have a multiplayer Cannon Fodder? That sentence usually ends with everyone agreeing and nothing happening. This time, rather than wait, it looked like the perfect chance to find out what AI could actually do.

Before I knew it, it was ready. A mate played it and told me what was wrong, and it got fixed. Less than two days after that message, we were playing it together on our phones.

Then came the bit nobody had asked for: Office Mode. Bullets became verbal assaults. Grenades became slop grenades. Rockets became unsolicited calendar requests. Nobody died in this version. You just burnt out.

Bangers Revenge

Next came something with wheels. A kart racer in the SNES style, starring rubbish 90s British cars on potholed roads, with Pauline, 74, at the wheel of a Nisson Mikro and a championship called the Fluffy Dice Cup. It began as a single-file prototype in claude.ai and went into Claude Code on 2 October. By 7 October it had a hundred and seventeen commits and fifteen tracks, from Winsford to Cape Town via Stoke and Berlin. It also had a career mode, online rooms, and a split screen mode where everyone on the sofa used their phone as the controller.

The split screen was the bit I tried with my daughter. The Left and Right buttons did not feel right while looking at the telly. So they went, replaced by a strip you put your thumb on and slid. That fix came from playing it with a real child, not from anything Claude could have worked out alone.

Little Generals

Then the ambitious one. Toy soldiers fighting across six rooms of one family's house, from a Roman villa to today's living room. Built in Godot, played in the browser. The first commit was on 6 October. Two days later it had two hundred and twenty, and you could play a friend online.

The house joins in. A terrier steals your men. A clockwork train knocks them over. Dawdle too long and your sister drops a porcelain doll on your army. Halfway through a battle, Nanny calls you for tea and everything stops. Say "five more minutes" and she gets crosser. The pause card reads "Nanny has asked once. Nicely." There is even a copy of H. G. Wells's Little Wars on the nursery bookshelf, for anyone who looks.

How it actually got built

Claude Code did the building. How the games should play was a two-way process. I decided what they should be, Claude built it, I played it, and we went round again. The refining was half the work, and the better half.

The surprise was where the ideas came from. With remote access on my phone, I could be out walking the dog, have a thought, send it off, and find it working by the time I was back at my desk. Idea, build, play, all before the dog had finished with the lamp posts. The Mac mini carried on without me.

For Little Generals I asked it to carry on overnight, with a review against the design brief after every hour of work, a written judgement call, and then on to the next milestone. By midnight the core of the game was playable end to end: pick a toy, hop, aim, fire, watch it topple. The next day, while I was out, it kept going, and I came back to a feedback sheet with ten things to try, each with the call it had made and a question for me.

That part worked better than I expected. It was not magic, though, and the failures were useful. The earlier prototypes had looked dull, all boxes and spheres in a muted army palette, and no amount of lighting fixed it, so the whole thing was started again in Godot with designed toys. Its own lessons notes said features had come before feel. Bangers had the second player a couple of seconds behind the host in multiplayer, until I played it and noticed.

The biggest lesson was about phones. I had been playing everything on the Mac, and assumed that was how everyone would. But send someone a game link and they assume it is for their phone. For the first people I sent one to, it did not work. That was on me, not them, and it is why phones came first from then on.

Claude wrote the code. The ideas, the "no, that is not fun", the dog-walk messages and the handing of a phone to a child were the other half. All of it was learning, and a lot of fun.

Have a go

All three are playable from Pardo Games. They are free, they run in the browser, and there are no accounts. They are betas, so they are always open to improvement. If something breaks, or a level is rubbish, or you love a car, I want to know.

And if you have a game suggestion, I'm game. No pun intended. Then I realised it was a pun, and kept it in anyway, which I suppose makes it intended. Send ideas, bugs and complaints to pardo@pardounlocked.com.

As for the running, the Great Reset and Challenge 75 are due to start. The next Split comes when there is something to report, ideally involving trainers.