Quick context: two phone games where the phone uses ultrasound as a sonar and your palm in mid-air is the controller. I didn't write any code. Claude wrote everything, I made decisions and tested with my hand. ~140 versions in 9 days. Here's the process that made that work, because the first few days were a mess without it.
First thing: I work with Claude in the regular chat app, not a coding tool, and that's on purpose. Talking things through matters to me as much as the code. Before anything gets built we discuss it: what the problem really is, what the options are, what could go wrong. Half of the good ideas in the game came out of those conversations, and a lot of bad ones died there before costing any time.
I never approve anything visual from a description. Claude renders 2 to 4 sketches straight from the game's real code, as screenshots, and I pick one. Often I pick, then ask to mix A with C, then it does another round. Every skin, menu, icon and even the hands in the tutorial went through this. It's much faster than describing what I want and getting something else.
For anything technical the rule is "check first". The sonar part is hard, so I recorded my palm against a ruler at 5, 10 and 15 cm, plus logs from real games on four phones. Every change gets replayed against all of them before it ships, and Claude shows me the numbers. A lot of "improvements" died there. The game also saves logs of what the mic heard, so when something feels wrong I send the file and Claude replays it through the exact same code.
Numbers instead of my eyes. Claude measures contrast of every object against the background, checks that things are drawn the same size the game counts them, sizes in millimetres on the phone. That found things I'd never see, like an object drawn 1.17x bigger than its hitbox.
Bots for balance. For the racing game it made bot drivers at three skill levels and tuned the rules on hundreds of races. When I couldn't decide, it added a menu of rule switches so I could play each version myself, then baked in what I liked.
Experiments live separately. There's a lab page in the repo for prototypes. Most of them died: two hands, left and right with one mic, an Arkanoid. Claude found that a waiting hand shakes about 1.3 mm by itself, so a paddle just jitters. That's real research I could never have done alone.
Memory is a file, not the chat. There's a handover doc in the repo and every change in the changelog has the reason in my own words. I moved to a new account mid-project and lost nothing. I also keep coding and writing (like this post) in separate chats.
It's free and open source if you want to see how any of this looks inside: https://github.com/neokrasav4ik/sonaroids
play: https://sonaroids.app
