Doodle District by @EvanMilenko
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Shooter, Action · Claude Fable 5.1 + Claude Opus 5

Doodle District

Top 5 in Edition No. 1

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Opens doodleshooter.vercel.app in a new tab

Best on a computer

You hold off waves of scribbled enemies in a city sketched in blue ballpoint on lined paper, picking between a rifle, shotgun, sniper and katana, with grenades on G. Movement goes well past running and gunning: wall jumps, double jumps, slides, an air dash and a grapple that swings you around or yanks enemies off ledges. Solo survival runs on two maps, the rooftops and fire escapes of Doodle District and the vines and temple of Doodle Jungle, and an online free-for-all takes up to 10 players. Best on a computer: it needs a keyboard and mouse, or a controller.

How the creator made it

The creator built the game over a couple of days with Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5 in Claude Code, and says they didn't write any of the code. One prompt gave them a rough single-player version, and the rest took many more rounds of telling Claude what to fix, add or tweak. Their own part, they say, was the creative direction, feature ideas and playtesting to find bugs.

Time
“Over the span of a couple of days”, in the creator’s words. They posted a demo clip on September 4 and opened the game to everyone, with multiplayer, on September 5. ↗ ↗ ↗
Code
They used Claude Code with Claude Fable 5.1 and Opus 5, in Three.js, for “the bulk of the game”, and say “I didn’t write a single line of code.” After release they “tweaked a few things with Astra”. ↗ ↗
Art
Their spoken prompt set the look, “a doodle world come to life”, and left the colors open: “when appropriate, maybe some other colors are allowed, but I don’t know. You’d be the judge of that one.” ↗
Levels
They announced a new map, Doodle Jungle, on September 7, and on September 9 asked players to reply with the features, weapons and maps they wanted next. ↗ ↗

The creator's steps

  1. Open Claude Code. The creator calls these steps “The Five Guys Method”.
  2. Write a prompt. They dictated theirs with text-to-speech, so it came out “quite long and rambly”; part of it is shown below.
  3. Step away while it works: they went to Five Guys for a burger.
  4. Check the results.

If you want to try something like it

  • Your prompt needn’t be perfect: the creator says prompts “barely even have to make sense”.
  • Expect a rough first version, then improve it a request at a time. Theirs came from one prompt, and the rest “took quite a few more iterations”, which they say “Wasn't difficult at all just gotta tell it what to fix/add/tweak.”
  • Three.js is free. Claude Code needs a paid Claude plan or API credits.

From their post on X ↗, 7 other posts on X (1 ↗ 2 ↗ 3 ↗ 4 ↗ 5 ↗ 6 ↗ 7 ↗) and a page on piratewires.com ↗.

The prompt

You know, this doodle art style, I’m, like, thinking, like, imagine, like, a doodle world come to life, basically. And, uh, when appropriate, maybe some other colors are allowed, but I don’t know. You’d be the judge of that one. Um, and maybe even, like, add, like, a katana you can wield or something like that to deflect bullets or something or, like, to to slash enemies.

This is part of the prompt; the creator didn't share all of it.

Where the prompt was shared ↗

The game and its prompt belong to @EvanMilenko. Preview recorded by us. Made this game? Here's how we list it.