"Make it a LOT more fun"
It started as a small breakout game from one of my earlier videos: unread messages are the bricks, and hitting one marks it read. Then I gave Claude Opus 5.5 a single line from Simon Willison, word for word: "This game isn't fun enough yet. Make it a LOT more fun." Nothing else.
It worked on that for 127 minutes in Claude Code and sent out 19 subagents. First it wrote a script that plays the game by itself. Then it held a design meeting, with designers for feel, pacing, levels, risk and reward, and office jokes, plus judges whose job was to pick holes. It found real problems with the original: the ball could bounce up and down an empty column for 235 seconds without touching a message. Then it rebuilt the whole thing as a work week, with an all-hands on Tuesday, someone out of office on Wednesday, reply-all chain reactions on Thursday and the boss on Friday.
I played a bunch of rounds and it was a lot more fun, with two problems. On a phone held upright the ball spent seconds flying through empty space, and Monday felt almost like the old game, with nothing new until Tuesday. Ten more minutes: the messages moved down and filled more of a tall screen, your first ball on Monday can set off a chain of red megaphones, and the boss drops by within about eight seconds. On our own test bot, time the ball spent hitting nothing on a phone went from 17.5% to 6.7%. That's the version here, with the text in English.
The video follows a separate run of the same experiment, so the games in it play differently from this one.
