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I didn't set out to build a Breakout clone, but that's what I \u2014 or really Claude, under my direction \u2014 did, and it took less time than it takes to watch a half dozen cat videos.<\/p>\n
Here's how it started. Claude was having issues. Anthropic's powerful and popular generative AI platform was apparently going up and down, and some were complaining, but when I checked, Claude told me, "I'm doing well, thanks for asking!" I realized, though, that if the problems were intermittent, I might need a tougher task to test Claude's overall stability.<\/p>\n
More than a year ago, I worked with Claude, or rather guided Claude through the process of recreating the early 1980s arcade game classic: Asteroids. The final game, which Claude exported as a shareable artifact, was the product of hours of guidance and back-and-forth between me and the AI. It didn't start off great, but with each prompt, we iterated, and the game improved until I had a rather robust and true-to-the-original Asteroids knockoff.<\/p>\n
With that in mind, I tasked Claude AI, running the free Sonnet 5 model at "Medium" level, with creating a Breakout clone.<\/p>\n
Breakout is one of my favorite games, something I've played on early consoles, PCs, and even my old BlackBerry, where "Brick Breaker" was one of the few preloaded games.<\/p>\n
The game rules are pretty simple. There's a multi-level brick wall (usually eight bricks deep) at the top of the screen, a paddle at the base, and a bouncing ball you bounce off the paddle to break down the brick wall.<\/p>\n
For my prompt, I tried to describe, in some detail, my game, and was not coy about it being an online version of Breakout:<\/p>\n
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Let's make a quick game. I want an online version of the old Breakout game, but let's replace the bricks with robots that are always slowly marching down toward you (if they reach you, it's game over). The ball that you bounce off your side-sliding controller is a gear that breaks up the robots easily in the first level. In the second level, the robots are shinier and harder, and the gear takes three or more hits to break and make a robot disappear. If you clear the level, the gear turns into a titanium ball that bounces faster but is more powerful. Controls are either keyboard\/arrow based and mouseable. Want this to result in a web-based, shareable game, so a link\/artifact I can share online.<\/p>\n
That's all the direction I gave it. I didn't describe colors, the initial speed of the ball, or even how quickly the robots would march down the screen. I didn't get into details about the look of the robots, instead relying on generalities and some material descriptions to help guide Claude.<\/p>\n
It took me a minute or two to write the prompt and around three minutes for Claude to deliver the results, which it cleverly called "Gearbreaker".<\/p>\n
I got a brief description of gameplay and levels (there are just two for now) :<\/p>\n
Level 1 \u2014 matte robots, one hit each from the spinning gear ball. They march downward on a timer; let them cross the dashed red hazard line and it's instant game over.<\/p>\n
Level 2 \u2014 shinier robots (metallic gradient, cyan eyes) that soak up 3 hits, shown as pips along the bottom of each unit. Same gear ball, tougher targets.<\/p>\n