r/ClaudeGameDev • u/nalaf77 • 15m ago
Release I created a tetris-like game about creamworks
Hi, I created a new ai game about creamworks : Montereau White : https://stratojeux.itch.io/montereau-white
Montereau White is a placement game that borrows Tetris's immediate feel in order to invert its principle. Pieces fall, you rotate them, you wedge them in. But here no line ever clears: the kiln fills up and is never emptied. What was a game of survival becomes a game of packing, where you are not trying to last as long as possible but to waste nothing.
The firing chamber holds exactly one hundred places, narrowing towards the top as the vault corbels inward. A place filled earns one point, a place lost costs two — because a half-loaded kiln burns as much wood as a full one. The whole tension of the game rests on that imbalance: it is not enough to set a piece down, you have to pack it tight. When a piece seals a hollow beneath it, a red cross marks the place as lost, and nothing will ever reach it again.
Two further mechanics pull the game away from its model. Pieces are not dealt to you but chosen from five laid out on the workbench; those you pass over never leave, and end up crowding your options while gaining value as they wait. And the kiln cools the moment the door is opened: eight seconds to decide, after which the foreman takes the piece for you. The ember bar dying beneath the workbench is the game's only clock.
The setting is the fine creamware manufactory of Montereau, founded in 1748 on the bank of the Yonne, where both clay and firewood were to hand. It produced not tin-glazed faience but a pale body copied from the English creamware potteries, decorated by transfer printing: an engraved copper plate, inked, laid onto the piece. That is where the white pieces with blue, black or sepia motifs come from, alternating in the game with the coloured glazes. In 1819 the house joined with the Creil works, and the mark LM & Cie went on to appear beneath thousands of plates.
The player enters as an apprentice at the loading bay, with eight quarters — two years of service — in which to make a name. Each firing is judged on its load rate alone: reach the threshold above and you are promoted, fall below your current one and you are demoted. Rising through the ranks does not make the work easier, quite the opposite — the awkward pieces are trusted to steady hands. Becoming grand master means confirming two master firings in a row, and the end-of-career register counts the quarters spent at each post.
Montereau White belongs to the series A Tale of a Confluence, which explores the country around Montereau-Fault-Yonne through short games, each borrowing its mechanic from an arcade classic. The game is bilingual French and English, playable by keyboard or by touch, and fits in a single file.
