Pack It Up

majoring in Mechanical Engineering. My game is based on packing a suitcase, and putting as many items as possible inside of it, making sure you have all of your necessities. I used to like to play the game Kanoodle and this is somewhat inspired by it. Some design choices that I came up with was a conveyor that the items go on. Originally, it was just like a jigsaw puzzle game; match the items to fill the correct space and you win, but I was done with the level way too fast. This made it much more difficult, so I had to add multiple difficulties to balance it out as well. Something I rejected was Claude’s idea to add fragile objects, which would mean that there would be multiple layers of the suitcase. I felt that it wouldn’t fit the original idea I had for the game. When I asked Claude to end the round when all sections were filled, it gave more than I asked, ending when there are no more items in the conveyor or being held by you, which wasn’t asked of it. I had to override the controls because I wanted it to be completely playable with just a mouse and not have to rely on the keyboard. The part of the game that was truly by me was the idea, and its design. Most aspects of the game were thought of by me. Some parts definitely were inspired by what Claude said, such as adding a hold or preview like in tetris, but others such as having a trash can so that endless is actually possible. Some prompts that I gave Claude was: “make a preview to show what item is coming next on the conveyor, a hold slot for an item, and a packing list that is required as well.” and “if possible, make 3 different gamemodes: easy - all the items are on the side with no conveyor belt, normal , and hard with the item zones being different shapes.” I can’t claim complete ownership since I didn’t write any of the code, but since I designed and told Claude what to do, I can confidently say that we have made equal contribution to the game.

AI Disclosure

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I used Claude desktop to generate ideas. It gave me a bunch that I didn’t find interesting

except for one called The Last Train. It was basically putting all the items into a suitcase, which made me think of Kanoodle, inspiring the game. I asked for its opinion on platformers and fighting games, but it said it was too complicated or too generic. I decided on the packing game and when I got stuck, I also asked Claude what makes a game fun, which gave me the idea to make different game modes. Most of the iterations of the game were from ideas I generated by myself. I had 15 - 20 iterations before the final game result.