Tide Pool Curling

My name is Dylan Aufman, and I am a junior at Northeastern University studying History and Political Science. For this assignment, I created a new game through Claude Code named Tide Pool Curling. I always had some mild interest in making computer sports games, but until learning more about the capabilities of Claude Code, I had no idea how to go about doing that. I used to curl as a kid at my town’s local curling club, and I had never seen an interesting online curling game to play. The other curling games that I have played have been more basic and, after some practice, way too easy and predictable to master. Therefore, I prompted Claude to come up with some ideas about a curling video game, and one idea caught my attention.

Tide Pool Curling swaps out the traditional sheet of ice for a frozen tide pool, with eddies (small whirlpools) and jet streams determining which way the stone will travel. This initial idea gained my interest because I wanted to create a game that had some element of unpredictability, as I find that the best sports games are the ones that have real variance between each individual match (or end, in the case of curling). After some needed fine-tuning, I feel like I have achieved my goal of creating a game that is replayable as well as challenging, as I have lost more often than I have won in my trials against the AI opponent, even after specifically telling Claude to reduce its difficulty. At one point, Claude proposed making multiple difficulty levels, but after testing these modes out I scrapped the idea because the easy difficulty Claude made was too easy and the hard difficulty it made was impossible. After trying this, I settled on the game’s current difficulty, which I feel is more competitive after several rounds of practice.

In addition to being a fan of how the tide pool element of the game came out, I also like the format I chose for game length. Each game consists of three ends of three stones each, using the same scoring system as professional curling. This makes Tide Pool Curling games faster than other curling games, which usually more closely follow the length of actual curling games

(usually around six to eight ends). In my opinion, the speed of the game enhances Tide Pool Curling’s replayability. This is an area where I really had to push Claude Code to get it right. I had to prompt Claude to change the number of stones in each end from six per team to three; then I also had to ask Claude to create an end limit of three for each game, as Claude initially made Tide Pool Curling a forever-running scoreboard of ends. When I made the latter request, Claude suggested a couple of tiebreaker scenarios to resolve ties. I chose its second idea of having a sudden-death stone, which I thought made for a quicker and more entertaining end than its initial idea of a whole overtime end.

While I did not come up with the unique idea of having the ice become a frozen tide pool that changed with each end, I feel like I shaped Tide Pool Curling into a much more refined product. Creating this game took fewer rounds of iteration than I had thought. The detailed initial instruction I gave Claude Code was a more concise, human-edited version of an initial instruction drafted by Claude Desktop, and although it took Claude Code almost ten minutes to create this initial game, it gave a pretty solid initial draft that I only needed to tinker with rather than fully rewrite. Overall, I was impressed with Claude Code’s capabilities as well as Claude Desktop’s creativity in my completion of this assignment.