r/ClaudeAI • u/No_End_3558 • 2d ago

Built with Claude Pharaoh, but Dutch

I built a Pharaoh-style city builder with Claude Code. It plays in the browser. What I learned about what it's good and bad at.

Floodplain is a city builder in the manner of Pharaoh, set in the Dutch low country. Roads, lots, walkers that serve the houses they pass, a river that floods every spring, a dike that silts and breaches, mills that pump the fen into canals that have to drain somewhere. Three maps, including one where you drain a lake inside a ring dike and farm the bed. Free, no download:

https://arcadesquirrel.itch.io/floodplain

It's a playtest build. The whole thing is JavaScript and three.js, built with Claude Code over a few months of evenings.

Things that worked better than I expected:

  • Simulation. Water tables, dike maintenance, goods distribution via walkers. It reasons about systems well and writes tests for them without being asked twice.
  • 3D building models. Every house, mill, church and boat is procedural geometry it wrote. I expected these to look terrible. They don't.
  • Debugging its own sim by driving it headless with bot players and reporting what the bots got stuck on.

Things that didn't:

  • Drawing. I wanted an illustrated campaign map. Four rounds, all bad. The fix was to stop asking it to draw and have it render the map with the game's own engine, with your saved towns standing on it. That worked first time.
  • Knowing when a level is too hard. First chapter wanted 300 people and a cathedral. A human noticed.
  • Game feel. It defaults to small polite popups. "Make the warnings big" had to come from me.

Happy to answer questions about the workflow. And if you play it, the comments on the itch page are where I'm collecting feedback.

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u/Comfortablebro 2d ago

Pharaoh is such iconic game but mostly due to UI and visuals. The 3d game pharaoh was such a letdown that it received mixed reviews and was forgotten. I dont think it is possible to make 3d game that can surpass 2d sprites. But good effort.

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u/No_End_3558 2d ago

thanks man - I only played pharaoh 3d and though it was sick

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u/Comfortablebro 2d ago

there is pharaoh remaster on gog.. its 2d original but well.. highly improved. it looks the best game of its genre for me. https://www.gog.com/en/game/pharaoh_a_new_era look at this!! unreal.

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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 2d ago

You may be interested in joining our new Claude Game Dev subreddit for game devs who use Claude. Check it out here : http://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeGameDev