A game in progress · early playtest
Driftworks
A game about a dead station you wake up and build into a factory, and the frigate you fly to feed it. I'm designing it and playtesting every version; Claude, Anthropic's AI, writes the code. It changes every day.
Play the current buildRead the devlog
- Version 32
- Updated Oct 16, 2026
- Mac trackpad or mouse, and a keyboard
Build 22, the copper line
What it is
Wake the station, feed the factory
Far out in the dark, a derelict station drifts. It doesn't fly and it never will: it's home, and the place your factory grows. You are the AI aboard a small frigate with a hold, a battery and one drone. You fly it like a unit in a real-time strategy game: select it, right-click a rock, and it flies there, cracks the rock apart with its laser while the drone brings the pieces aboard, then hauls the ore home and docks to recharge.
At the station you build on a hex grid around the dock. Every module starts empty, and you give it a job and a recipe: a burner for power, a smelter for iron or copper, a constructor for plates or wire. You join them with belts and pick what each one carries. The factory runs while you're out, and its next bottleneck decides where you fly next. Iron lies close by, copper far out, and more lies farther still.
The look is geometric: thin outlines on black, with colour only for cargo, jobs and status. It began as the second version of Jumpgate and borrows its outline art and music.
Where it stands
- Stage
- Early playtest, version 32
- Updated
- Oct 16, 2026, 7:40 pm
- Playable now
- Chapters 1 to 3, about 35 to 40 minutes: fly the frigate out to iron rocks, mine and haul ore home, build modules on the hex grid round the dock, give each a job and a recipe, belt them together, power the station, smelt iron and make plates, fetch copper from the far field and make wire, then make data cards, turn them into compute in a cooled data center, chain a second burner and build a lab. Runs in the browser with a mouse and keyboard.
- Next
- Select, move and rotate groups of modules; remove a module; copy a module's setup.
- Drop cargo from the frigate.
- Chapter 4: the research tree.
- Open question
- How the station grows past two lines: more of each module, mergers and splitters, and moving whole sections.
How it's being made
The full devlog- 32versions in the first 9 hours, from the first message at 10:34 am
- 27notes from me, typed or dictated while I played
- 2,801lines of code, every one written by Claude
- 31devlog entries, each with my words
I direct and playtest
I decide what the game is and how it should feel, play every version, and send notes as I go: what's confusing, what's too fast, what I want next.
Claude writes the code
Claude, Anthropic's AI, turns each note into a new version, tests it and publishes it, often within minutes. It also asks questions and suggests a default when a decision is open.
Every version is logged
The devlog keeps my notes in my own words, what changed and screenshots, so you can follow the whole thing from the first message.
Latest from the devlog
All 31 entries
Play the build
It runs in the browser on a computer, with a trackpad or mouse and a keyboard. It's an early build: it changes every day and saves can reset between versions. Tell me what felt good and what didn't.
Written with Claude, from the conversation where the game is being made.