MATCH POINT

My name is Ava Desanti. I am a second-year student majoring in political science with a concentration in law and legal studies. My game is based on my experience playing against my best friend, who, similarly to me, played tennis competitively all throughout middle school and high school. We were both very good players, but my best friend was a little stronger than I was, had a better record, and had beaten me during practice. The game directly reflects how my mental strength and consistency helped me beat her every time we played an actual match, when the stakes and stress levels were very high. Claude was helpful when I told them that the serves were too powerful and were going too far at the beginning. However, I had to override some of its choices. For example, my opponent wasn’t very powerful at the start, even though I had told Claude that she was supposed to be better than me overall, and she was supposed to start off well. The memory of beating my best friend came from me, and I decided that the game should feel like my opponent cracks under pressure while I stay calm. Claude Code wrote the code that drew the court, moved the ball, made my friend miss, and played the sounds. So, in the literal sense of building the game, it was Claude. If someone else gave Claude Code a different idea, the game probably would not be the same because they did not have the exact same experience I had with my friend. Basically, the idea and the feeling are mine, but I could not have built this myself, so it is partly Claude’s doing. For example, I told Claude, “She plays the same at 4–4 as she does at 0–0. Starting at 3–3, make her react a little slower and miss more often, and show her shoulders slumping.” I also said, “I can’t tell how fast the ball is moving, so it feels unfair.” I told Claude to add a faint trail behind the ball and show the controls at the bottom of the screen. I also wanted to make sure Claude captured my opponent’s feelings, so I said, “When she’s rattled, I want to see it.” I asked it to add small tells, like her adjusting her grip, glancing at the ground, or taking a deep breath before serving, while keeping those details subtle so they would not look too artificial or cartoonish.

Ai disclosure:

I used Claude in the chat app to brainstorm game ideas, to help turn my memory of

playing my best friend into a design, to write my starting prompt for Claude Code, and to correct the grammar of this statement. I used Claude Code on the web to build the game. I did not write any of the code myself. I went through about 3 rounds of changes with Claude Code. Things I corrected or abandoned: I changed the fact that my opponent was not beating me at first, I changed her reactions to losing physically, I changed the speed and length that the ball went and those were the main switches I had to make to make a difference. I also had technical trouble getting Claude Code connected to GitHub and had one session hang before it worked, But I realized that it was easier than I thought, and I was looking too deeply into it for no reason and it ended up working out really easily.