Pooper Scooper

Class Year: 2026

Major: Pharmaceutical Science

Game Title: Pooper Scooper: Modern Street Cleaning Simulator

Pooper Scooper is a fast and funny arcade game about the daily chaos of owning a dog. The idea for this game came directly from my real life: I have a friend who constantly complains about how annoying and unpredictable it is to walk their dog and deal with its bathroom schedule. I wanted to turn that silly, everyday stress into a fun reflex game. Instead of making cleaning up after a pet feel like a boring chore, the game turns my friend's daily struggle into a fast-paced challenge where you have to catch falling waste.

I made a few key choices to keep the game fun and personal. First, I wanted players to be able to type in a custom "Dog Name" and tweak settings like speed and game duration. That way, players can name the dog after a friend and get a good laugh out of it. Second, during testing, the hard "Turbo Mode" was way too punishing, and players died immediately. I decided to give players a faster paddle, slightly slower drops, and two extra lives so that even the fastest mode felt challenging instead of unfair.

Working with Claude Code was an interesting back-and-forth process. One cool moment was when Claude created a clean settings screen that felt just like a console menu. On the other hand, I had to fix something Claude got wrong at first that originally, the waste fell in a straight line at the same speed, which felt very boring. I told Claude to scrap that and make the drops fall at random speeds and angles to make it feel unpredictable. Even though I didn't write the code line by line, this game is definitely my own creation because the idea, the funny tone, and the game balancing all came from me.

For the AI disclosure, I built this game using Claude Code and Claude Desktop through about 8 to 12 prompts. My main prompts included setting up the game idea ("Build a single-file HTML arcade game called Pooper Scooper based on my friend's daily dog struggles"), adding settings ("Add a setup menu so players can type in a custom dog name and change difficulty

settings"), and fixing the balance ("Turbo mode is too hard; make the paddle faster and give the player extra starting lives"). I spent time testing the game, fixing fast fall speeds, and making sure everything ran smoothly as a single file.