Clear Round — Show Jumping

Artist’s Statement: Clear Round Game

My name is Maddy Attar, and I am a fifth-year student in the D’Amore-McKim School of Business, graduating in May 2027 with a bachelor’s degree in Business Administration and a concentration in Finance. For my game, I chose to create something horse-related. The game consists of a course of jumps that the player must maneuver a horse through while timing each jump correctly. If the player mistimes a jump, they receive penalty points.

I chose this concept because I grew up riding horses. Horses are my favorite animal, and riding was a huge part of my life growing up. I had to stop competing when I got to high school, but I still miss it every day. I think there is an incredibly strong bond and level of trust between a horse and its rider, and this game was a fun way for me to represent something that was, and still is, very meaningful to me,

When designing the game, I chose to make the course simpler than a true show jumping course. The horse moves up, down, left, and right rather than following the more complicated movements that would happen in real life. I wanted the game to be difficult enough that the player had to stay engaged with the controls the entire time, while still giving them a reasonable chance of successfully completing the course. A realistic course would have made the game much more difficult, especially for someone without riding experience.

Although the course itself was simplified, I wanted the timing of the jumps to remain challenging. If the player does not press the space bar at the correct moment, the horse either

refuses the jump or knocks down a rail. The player also has to use the arrow keys to make sure the horse is properly aligned with each fence while preparing the jump. This added another obstacle beyond just simply pressing the space bar at the right time.

Overall, I think Claude did a great job turning my original prompt into a working game. One feature Claude created that I approved of was a bar in front of each jump that turns green when the player should press the space bar. This worked especially well because the game uses a bird’s-eye view, making it difficult for the player to judge exactly when the horse should just without some type of visual indicator.

One feature I rejected was the original way the horse moved around the course. The horse seemed to oscillate and rotate as it moved, which I found confusing. I wanted its movement to be much more direct, so I prompted Claude to have the horse move only at 45-degree angles: up, down, left, and right. Once this was changed, the controls felt much more intuitive and the game made more sense.

Overall, the final game is very close to what I originally anticipated. I wanted enough obstacles to make completing the course feel rewarding, but did not want the game to be so realistic that someone without riding knowledge could not play it. Three prompts that were especially important to the development were: “have the horse move only at a 45 degree angle,” “spread out the fences more so the player has time to react,” and “scoring follows real show jumping logic” clean jump = 0 faults, knocked rail = 4 faults, refusal = 4 faults and lost time.” While these were relatively small changes, I think they were some of the most important adjustments because they brought the entire game together and helped balance realism with playability. ​

AI Disclosure:

I used Claude chat at the beginning to narrow out my ideas and help me with a prompt to tell Claude code. I wrote the generalized prompt myself but had Claude chat help me with cleaning it up and how exactly to work the prompt so that Claude code could actually understand it. There were about ten lines of iteration total, even if they were small. Some of the iterations Claude code made were in relation to the angles I had the horse move and making the fences much further apart. The first time Claude Code made the game the horse was also moving way too fast, barely giving the player enough time to react. I had it slow down the speed so the horse was still moving fast enough to make the game challenging, but not too fast to make the game impossible to complete. I truly only outwardly corrected the way the horse was oscillating, that was something I wanted entirely fixed. Everything else that I mentioned above were just small edits or add-ons that were already in the game and just needed to be tweaked slightly.