Build a small browser RPG by playtesting successive Claude prototypes
At a glance
Simon Willison turns a three.js village demo into Emberwick through staged prompts and gameplay corrections. This workflow is listed under Game Development, Prototyping, Playtesting.
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What they did
1) Use Claude chat with access to Opus 5.5. Ask for a three.js top-down fantasy RPG demo: a movable player with companions, a furnished village, enterable buildings, and walls that become transparent when they block the camera. 2) Run the returned browser game and inspect movement, interiors, and visibility. Ask for terrain height, linked basements, and a mountain cave with a sleeping troll. 3) Once that prototype works, ask for a larger playable area, an original plot, magic, and a coherent gameplay loop. 4) Play the quests and report specific progression failures, such as a required character moving away because of another story event. Have Claude revise and replay the affected sequence. 5) Complete a start-to-finish playthrough before treating the HTML/JavaScript game as finished.
How it went
The author reports a completed story of roughly fifteen minutes, with further prompting needed to fix gameplay problems.
Worth knowing
He describes this as an experiment made without reading the generated code; this workflow validates the playable experience.
