Hot Plate Hustle

Hot Plate Hustle: Artist's Statement

I've never worked in a restaurant, but being a food runner felt like the perfect real-world job to turn into an arcade game. It's a fast-paced environment with orders coming in, food on a timer, and a clear way to mess up. It already has everything a game needs, so I built the game around it.

I made heat the main thing working against you instead of enemies. Every plate has a ring that drains while it sits, and the people blocking you are just other servers and guests. Nobody is trying to stop you. The pressure comes from how busy the place is.

The biggest change I made was to the strikes. Claude's first version gave you five mistakes before you lost, and when I played it, five felt like a lot. I could be careless and still be fine, so I cut it to three. I also thought the water on the floor didn't affect the player as much as it should. Hazards should actually slow you down. I kept the three-plate tray, where you serve plates in the order you picked them up. Carrying more saves trips, but if you grab the wrong ones you lose time fixing it. It makes you choose between playing it safe and getting greedy. Honestly, I was surprised how little I had to give Claude. One prompt got me a full, working game that actually felt fun, with progression and levels that get harder. My favorite part is how arcadey it feels: “COLD!” popping up over tables, a combo multiplier, a high score, rounds like “Dinner Rush” and “Total Chaos Service,” and guests yelling “I'm telling Yelp!” I never asked for any of that. When I lose, it's stressful, but in a fun way, and it feels like something you'd see in an actual arcade, which I'm proud of. The part Claude couldn't do was judge the difficulty. That took me playing it. If I could change one more thing, I'd make it a little harder.

I feel like the game is mine. I didn't write a single line of code, and Claude had a lot of liberty in how the game was built. But the overall idea is mine, and I think that creative part is what adds the most value. Anyone can get code from Claude. Deciding what the game should be and whether it's fun is the part that came from me.

Prompts

1. Initial build: “Build a single-file HTML arcade game. The player is a food runner moving top-down through a restaurant with arrow keys, picking up plates at the kitchen pass and delivering them to numbered tables with the spacebar. The challenge is other servers and guests blocking the path, and plates going cold if they sit too long. Each round is a timed rush that gets busier as you go; the game ends when too many tables get cold or wrong food.”

2. Feedback round: “maybe there should be less strikes, 5 seems to be a lot, the water on the floor also doesn't affect the player as much as I think it should”

AI Disclosure

I used Claude (chat) to brainstorm ideas, write my starting prompt, and help draft and edit this statement. I used Claude Code to build the game: one initial build and a couple of follow-up rounds. I changed the strike limit from five to three and asked for the floor water to slow the player more.