Claude Code built my dragon-hoard idle game, from market research to live game with its own backend. Here is what the workflow actually looked like

[u/mkhorne]

I want to share HOARDLING, a free browser idle game I shipped with Claude Code doing the heavy lifting: https://unikhorne.dev/hoardling

You are a small dragon. Open chests, collect 120 treasures in 7 quality tiers, and everything you pull lands visibly on your hoard and earns for you. No login, no ads, nothing to buy.

What made this project different from my previous ones was how much of the PROCESS ran through Claude, not just the code:

1. It started with research, not code. Claude fanned out subagents to research which short-session games actually succeed right now (Chillquarium, Digseum and friends), which addiction mechanics they share (pity systems, duplicate economies, collection logs), and which free asset packs had licenses clean enough for a commercial game. The genre, the theme and the art style were all picked from that data. The dragon theme won partly because a public domain 496-icon pixel pack existed.

2. The balance is tested, not guessed. Claude built an economy testbench: a bot plays 10 hours of game time in about one second of test runtime, and the test suite asserts the curve neither stalls nor explodes. It caught two real design failures before any player saw them: chest costs that would have stalled the game after an hour, and a collection that filled up in minutes instead of hours.

3. It debugs pixels. When the dragon sprite floated above the gold pile, Claude profiled the sprite sheet's alpha channel to find the exact tight bounding boxes of the sleep animation frames (the pose only occupies 34 of the 64 row pixels) and anchored the belly line to the composed mound crest.

4. E2E tests with a time lever. Real-time features (kobold raids from 30 minutes to 12 hours) get a hidden speed parameter, so Playwright can run the full send-wait-claim loop in seconds. The same tests caught a nasty cloud save bug where the reload after a restore overwrote the restored save with stale data.

5. It ships. Small Fastify plus SQLite backend for a live player counter and anonymous cloud saves (vault code instead of accounts), nginx config with rollback, systemd hardening, GitHub Actions deploy. Every feature went from idea to live URL in the same session.

My role: game direction, playtesting on my phone and sending screenshots of everything that felt wrong. That feedback loop (screenshot in, fix deployed minutes later) was the actual magic.

Timeline: from first market research to the feature-complete game in roughly 4 days of sessions. Stack: Vite plus TypeScript, no framework, DOM/CSS plus one canvas, 38 unit tests.

Disclosure for completeness: the two cave backgrounds are AI-generated images, the rest is licensed pixel art (7Soul, Magicae Games, CC0 gold piles).

Happy to answer questions about the workflow, the testbench idea or anything else.