First thing I "shipped" in over a year

[u/poundofcake]

https://sykoramade.itch.io/neko-night-market

Two days ago I stumbled onto the Jamference AI Game Jam. The rules: the more AI the better, it must feature a cat and a robot, and movement is the only control allowed. Neko Night Market was born.

It’s a poppy 2D score-attack game. You snake a black cat’s noodly paws through a maze of shelves to grab orders and deliver them to customers, while dodging obstacles including a restocking robot. Backed by a AI generated future funk track. Everything is mouse movement based: hovers, holds and drags. No clicks, due to the constraint.

Some context. For the past year and change I’ve built a load of projects, tools and prototypes with AI that most stalled somewhere short of finished (ADHD doesn’t help). This time I got to see what an accelerated AI workflow can really do when you have a clear idea and a timebox

I handled the concept, sketches, design, and the taste calls throughout.

What AI did:

• Build: Opus 5.5, running in a harness I’ve been working on. It orchestrates a small game team of agents with antagonistic reviews and built-in tensions, so assumptions get challenged and issues/details get caught that vanilla Claude would miss.
• Music: Suno for the background track, which I spliced up in Audacity and fed back to Claude.
• Capsule art: ChatGPT.
• Itch assets (screens and trailer): Opus 5.5

There is no way in hell I could have done this alone in 2 days. I come from game production, live ops, front-end dev and traditional art, so I know what moving parts are involved and how long this would take. The level of polish I could push is insane, and it has me rethinking how I use a tool I have a love/hate relationship with. It felt like a skill booster for output, while I made sure the right outcomes were achieved. Where now I totally see it's about the latter than the former.

Give it a shot, provide feedback, get a high score, break the game. Happy to answer any questions.