Meowtris 🐾

My name is Michelle and I’m a 4th year studying Finance in the D’Amore-McKim

School of Business. I chose a classic game like tetris due to its simplicity and casual gameplay. I themed it around cats because they add a cozy and fun vibe to the game and cats are my favorite animal. I purposely wanted the game to be simple and have more focus on looks and design over gameplay. My initial edits were regarding the overall appearance of the game, especially on the design of the pieces. The controls are typical for this type of game: pieces spawn at the top and the player can rotate and move them horizontally as they fall. I had to adjust the ending of the game, since there were issues with there being no ending screen when tested. Prompt: “when the cats hit the top there's no game over (or some indication of the game being over) or restart button that pops up, can that be added.” The issue ended up being in the spawn logic and collision check. The game felt a bit static, so I had Claude add music and sound effects, which was added with the option to be muted as well, something helpful that Claude added without me asking. There was an issue where music would continue to play when the tab wasn’t open, and I asked Claude “why am I still hearing the game when it's not open?” Claude picked up that the web audio oscillators would keep playing in the background and that it wasn’t ideal for an arcade game, making edits so that the game would pause and audio would suspend when the tab was not open. Claude initially produced more metrics than I had in mind, and I ultimately removed them (“level,” “lines”) for a greater focus on score alone.

While Claude wrote the code, I think directing the game’s production makes it somewhat mine. Using artificial intelligence to execute a vision feels more like a physical execution of my ideas and decisions. I see producing a creative project, like an arcade game, as a collaboration between humans and AI. When it comes to testing for issues and deciding whether a game is actually fun to play, a human is required to make those judgements. AI can create a game in minutes or even seconds, but it’s that back and forth development that really gives the project value.

AI Disclosure

I used Claude Code to create this project. It took about ten rounds of iteration to create the game. I had to make corrections to the end of the game, since there were issues that caused there to be no end at all, even when my initial prompt explained how/when the game ends. There were also some issues with the audio when testing how the game ran when its tab wasn’t open. I didn’t run into any major issues or failures, and the ones that I caught were easily fixed by Claude.