AI Projects • Browser Game

Hellmouth

A gothic arcade side-scroller. A monster hunter in a long coat, two stages of things that answer
to different weapons, and a Hellmouth at the end of it. Built with Claude Code. Free to play in your browser.

Opens in a new tab. Keyboard on desktop, touch controls on phones and tablets. Sound on.

Title screen Hellmouth title screen: the hunter in a long coat stands in a moonlit graveyard beneath the game's stone-and-skull logo

Built overnight

Thirty-three messages from the human. Everything else, from a blank folder to a playable stage, built by Claude Code while the human slept.

“I went to bed. Claude Code built an entire game overnight.” — Watch on YouTube

The rule: the right tool, or it gets back up

Every weapon carries a damage type. Every monster declares what each type does to it. That single table is the game.

You carry two weapons of six and swap between them. A chest overwrites the slot you are holding, so taking every chest in order is a real way to arrive somewhere holding two wrong answers. The loop stops being “find the best weapon” and becomes “read the monster, pick the answer, and don’t panic.”

KillsWoundsBreaksStaggersNothing
Dies on the spot. The matched weapon. Ordinary damage against hit points. Opens a two-stage monster up so it can be finished. Knocked back, gets up. Buys time, nothing more. No effect at all. Not reduced damage. None.
Fire

The shambling dead

An oil flask ends a zombie. Steel only knocks it flat, and it gets back up. Fire does nothing to the charred.

Silver

The werewolf

Only silver kills it. Anything else staggers it, the wound closes, and it comes back faster.

Salt or holy water

The spectre

Phases through walls and ignores everything physical. Not reduced damage: none. It forces the swap.

Holy water, then a stake

The vampire

Cannot be killed until holy water breaks it open. A two-step kill, introduced on a regular enemy so the boss fights read the same way.

Cold iron

The bell-wraith

Owns the bell shafts of the second stage. Only cold iron touches it.

Salt

The drowned

Anything puts a drowned down. Only salt keeps it down.

Two stages, two bosses, one world

Each band of each stage teaches exactly one fact about the rule. Then the boss asks you to use all of them.

Stage 1

The Long Night

9,800 pixels across five biomes, from the graveyard down to the gates of Hell.

  • The GraveyardThe rule itself: fire and salt put the dead down, steel only knocks them over.
  • The CryptImmunity. Spectres phase through walls and ignore all but salt and holy water.
  • The RampartsA named weakness. Silver, and only silver, kills a werewolf.
  • The DescentThe exception. The charred are immune to fire, over two lava crossings.
  • The HellmouthTwo-stage kills. Break the vampire, then finish it.
The graveyard: the hunter throws oil flasks at the dead among gnarled trees and tombstones
Stage 2

The Drowned Choir

8,400 pixels, and it goes inside and upward: a sunken cathedral of ladders, swinging bells and black water.

  • The Flooded NaveAnything puts a drowned down; only salt keeps it down.
  • The Bell ShaftsA change of shape. The way on is up, on ladders and moving bells, and only cold iron touches a wraith.
  • The OssuaryThree answers, two hands: salt, iron and silver are all required and you carry two.
  • The ChoirThe Tolling Saint, which owns the air rather than the ground.
The bell shafts: the hunter climbs through a cathedral tower of ladders and hanging bells
Bosses

The Hell-Stallion and the Tolling Saint

Stage 1 ends at the Hell-Stallion, a burning horse whose three phases each add a move rather than inflating numbers. Stage 2 ends in the Choir with the Tolling Saint, a chained, bell-wielding thing that owns the air rather than the ground.

Clearing stage 1 advances to stage 2 with your score and lives intact. There is a clock.

The Hell-Stallion, a burning armoured horse, rears at the hunter before the iron gates of the Hellmouth
Open world

A hub, six regions, six keys, one last door

The same engine under a world instead of a corridor. The Crossroads is the hub: it holds the hunter’s trunk, everything ever found, pick two, and a door to each region. Every region ends in a key. Four are open from the start; two are found the long way.

A held region opens with an ordinary monster at its gate: a spectre, a werewolf, a bell-wraith, a vampire. Kill it and the gate stays open. The engine has no “requires silver” rule. It is just a werewolf.

The world is validated on load: a walk from the starting loadout must reach the last door holding every key, or the game refuses to start. Progress saves itself. This is the build behind the Play Game button.

The Crossroads hub: the hunter stands before the mausoleum door to the Ramparts, with 0 of 6 keys

How it is built

Vanilla ES modules and a 2D canvas. No framework, no build step to play. Everything in it is original: characters, monsters, art, music and level design.

One file, nothing to install

The engine and every sprite sheet are bundled into a single self-contained HTML file. It needs no server, no network and no relative paths, which is how it is hosted here.

A fixed-timestep loop at 120 Hz

The jump arc is the game’s identity, so it cannot be allowed to vary with frame rate. The jump is locked at takeoff: no air control, ever. Fixed virtual resolution, one transform to the device.

Monsters and levels are data

A monster is a stat block bound to one of seven reusable behaviours. A level is one file: terrain, spawner bands, chests, checkpoints, biomes and the boss. Levels are validated on load, including whether a weapon that can kill each monster can actually be in your hands by the time you meet it.

AI-generated art, cut into sheets

Asset sources are AI-generated filmstrips (Higgsfield), chroma-keyed and cut into sprite sheets by the build pipeline. The hunter, every monster, both bosses and the title are original designs made for this game.

Audio synthesised at runtime

Procedural sound effects, an adaptive music sequencer and a generated convolution reverb. Nothing sampled, nothing transcribed, nothing to download.

Tuned by a bot

Nine test suites drive the real game in a real browser through a deterministic API. A deliberately mediocre bot plays each stage on three lives, and where it dies, bucketed by cause and by distance, is how the levels were tuned: a stage it can finish is a stage a person can finish.

Controls

Keyboard on desktop. On a phone or tablet the game draws its own touch controls.

MoveArrows / WASD
JumpSpace
AttackX
Swap weaponC
CrouchDown
Aim upwardUp + X
Drop through a platformDown + Space
PauseP
MuteM
Restart stageR

In the open world: Tab opens the map, Up at a door enters it, Up at the trunk arms you, and C on the title screen continues a saved game.

Read the monster. Pick the answer.

Free, in the browser, nothing to install. Sound on.