WICK

🕯️ You are Wick, a candle-cat.

Your wax is your health, your height and your light. It burns down all the time, faster when you run, and every jump costs a little. Reach the next torch before you burn down to a stub.

But wax is also your only tool. Drip it to build a blob: bridge a gap, make a step, rise up a wall, stack a pillar mid-jump. Every ledge becomes a tradeoff: spend wax to get there, or save it to survive the trip. Soak a blob back up when you're done with it.

Made for AI Browser Game Jam 5, theme 🔥 TORCH 🔥. Torches are your checkpoints, your fuel, and the light that keeps the dark away.

✨ Features

• 15 hand-tuned levels, from a tutorial market street to the finale climb up the Castle Stair
• A build-with-your-health mechanic: dripping wax shrinks you, dims your light and shortens your jump
• Hazards and puzzles: wind gusts and golden tailwinds, rain drips, dark zones, cobwebs, burning fuses, pressure plates and doors, moving carts, lifts and ferries, and wax-stealing moths
• Atmosphere: dynamic lighting, bloom, light shafts, weather, and a signature set piece for every level (windmills, lightning, swinging bells, a Ferris wheel with fireworks, an aurora, stained glass)
• Plays everywhere: keyboard, Xbox controller and touch (iPhone in landscape)
• A credits roll that's honest (and a bit funny) about how an AI made it

🎮 Controls

Action	Keyboard	Controller	Touch
Move	← → / A D	Left stick / D-pad	Thumb pad
Jump	Space / ↑ / W	A	JUMP
Drip wax	↓ / S / X	X or RT	DRIP
Soak a blob back up	E	B	SOAK
Restart from last torch	R	Y	Pause → Restart
Pause / Mute	Esc or P / M	Menu / View	❚❚

💡 Tips

• Torches are checkpoints and give +40 wax once. Pumpkins give +15.
• A glowing outline shows where your next blob will land. Blobs stay solid for 14 seconds.
• Leaves and streaks warn you before a gust. Golden gusts are tailwinds: jump with them to fly further.
• Pressure plates hold their door open only while something sits on them, and a wax blob counts.

🤖 How it was made (AI Usage)

WICK was built entirely through prompting: one human directing, and Claude Code (Anthropic's coding agent, running Claude Opus) doing the work. It wrote, tested and deployed every line: code, levels, art, tooling and tests. The human wrote the design doc, played builds on an iPhone, and asked for the next thing.

• Design → game in one pass: a single long design doc ("WICK: Design Doc and Agent Build Plan") produced the first playable build. About 15 follow-up prompts like "Improve the VFX", "Make the gameplay more fluid" and "Add more interesting puzzling levels" shaped the rest.
• Art: 100% procedural, drawn in code with Canvas 2D. No image files at all. Lighting is a darkness layer with light holes cut out, plus bloom, rim light, colour grading, vignette and grain.
• Audio: Claude used the Hugging Face CLI to find open models, then generated music with facebook/musicgen-medium and sound effects with cvssp/audioldm2 locally on an RTX 4060. Each sound effect was generated three times and the best picked by CLAP score. A WebAudio synth fills any gaps.
• AI QA: with no human testers, Claude wrote a reachability bot that plays every level with the real physics to prove each one is finishable and has no soft locks, then replayed recorded routes in headless Chrome with live wind, rain and fire.

Tech: vanilla JavaScript, Canvas 2D and WebAudio. No engine, no libraries, no build step.

📂 Full source, every prompt used, and the test tools: github.com/corycowgill/Wick

🎵 Credits

• Design and direction: Hallucinated Games
• Built with Claude Code
• Music: facebook/musicgen-medium by Meta AI (CC-BY-NC-4.0)
• Sound effects: cvssp/audioldm2 by CVSSP, University of Surrey (CC-BY-NC-SA-4.0)

#AIGameJam