Escape from Earth: a quick experiment in AI game design

TL;DR It was quite fast and easy.

Following the news that Anthropic had forbidden Claude from just recreating games for its users, I was curious how easy it would be to design and implement a game from scratch.

I dug out a game concept, Escape from Earth, that I had written back in my university days, but never implemented. The core idea was that you are a somewhat clueless alien who crash-landed on prehistoric Earth and needed to get humanity up to speed on technology and civilisation so they can fix your spaceship. The document I found was a short, three-page write-up with some details, but not much else.

The original concept (2005)Three pages, in German, with an English translation Read →

VERSION 117 min
The old concept dropped in as is. A cute, fully playable game, but too easy.
VERSION 210 min
A few suggestions: more conflict, more difficulty, more on the map.
VERSION 330 min
Built from a longer design document written together with Claude.

ITERATION 1Just build it

In the first iteration I just dropped the document into Claude Opus 5.5 and asked it to build the game. After 17 minutes, no high effort, I had the first playable prototype. It was an HTML file that was surprisingly only about 100 KB. Loading it up revealed a cute, fully playable game, including all the features I outlined in the brief. I watched a friend of mine play through the game, and we concluded that it was a bit too easy, and offered little conflict. I also found that there was not a lot happening on the globe.

ITERATION 2More conflict

I simply gave a few more suggestions, asking it to add more conflict and difficulty, and adding some more elements that utilise the map, and some additional interactions with the people. A second version was quickly put together by Claude, and after another 10 minutes, we could play that one as well. This one was a bit more challenging, but the game felt a bit too simple.

ITERATION 3Design first, then build

For the third iteration I first had a longer design discussion with Claude. I wrote out some more detailed feature lists, and first developed a longer design document with Claude. The final design doc is linked here as well:

Design document, version 3 (2026)Regions, politics, characters, three routes to victory, 30 ideas Read →

Claude then built version three, which you can play by clicking below. It took another 30 minutes, and yielded a respectable browser game.

Play Escape from Earth

Runs in the browser, on desktop or tablet. Your game is saved in the browser as you play.

Play version 3

The game screen: a globe with the territories of several human peoples on the left, and a list of the peoples of Earth on the right — About 1,200 years in. The politics layer colours each people's land by its kind of government: red for rule by strength, blue for rule by council, gold for rule by faith.

Title screen with a choice between three alien species: Glorp, Vel and Krrt — The title screen. Each of the three alien species suits a different way of playing: as a visitor, in disguise, or as a god.

Detail panel for one people, showing who holds power and character cards for their leaders — Every people has named leaders with personalities and attributes. Their attitude toward you is a blend of whoever holds power.

The ideas tab, listing technologies such as fire, stone tools and ritual, each with an effect for humans and for the player — The ship computer's archive. Each of the 30 ideas changes something for the humans and something for you.

VERDICTNot perfect, but impressive

The game still has some issues: the interface, interaction and design might be a bit bloated at the moment, not everything is intuitive, and some elements might not meaningfully contribute to the game loop. But overall, I was quite impressed by how I could get from a simple existing idea, spending a few hours on design instructions and about an hour of LLM implementation, to a functioning game.