A game in progress · early playtest
HollowARK
A game about a seed ship buried inside a mountain, the AI that wakes up inside it, and the drones that dig it out into the light. I'm designing it and playtesting every version; Claude, Anthropic's AI, writes the code.
Play the current buildRead the devlog
- Version 71
- Updated Oct 15, 2026
- Plays in a desktop browser, with mouse and keyboard
Version 70, a base of seed pods in a cave in bloom
What it is
Wake in the dark, dig toward the light
The Ark, a seed ship with four hundred colonists asleep in cryo, lies buried deep inside a mountain. You are ARK, its mind, waking at 3% power in a pocket of rock barely bigger than the ship, lit by one patch of glowing plants through a crack. Every tunnel your drones dig reveals more of the map: ore to mine and smelt, rock to turn into concrete, caves of plants that bloom and rest and power everything. And the caves aren't empty.
When the Ark can move again, it bores up through the hardened seal and breaks into daylight on a bright, barren surface where the swarm lives. From there the game grows like a tree over six chapters: wake the colonists, spread a network, found a city, turn the planet green, and reach for the seed kit still waiting in orbit.
The look is Lantern: dark caves lit only by the plants and the Ark's lamps, pale ceramic machines that open like seed pods, and a bone-white surface under an amber sun. The music is made live in code and follows the bloom.
Where it stands
- Stage
- Early playtest, version 71
- Updated
- Oct 14, 2026, 8:01 pm
- Playable now
- All of Chapter One, The Seed, start to finish, in the new Lantern look. ARK, the Ark's own AI, wakes at 3% power in a pocket of rock barely bigger than the ship, lit by one patch of glowing cave plants through a crack. Dig out to reveal the map, mine, smelt, mix rock into concrete and repair the Ark on plant power alone, with three drones at most. Break into the copper cave and the caves' own creatures come for the Ark, and its turret cuts them down. Then the Ark bores through the hardened seal into daylight and reads the stars to learn how long it slept. About 20 minutes for the test player at normal speed. The music follows the plants' bloom, and the chapter ends with a time-lapse of your run. Settings, rebindable keys and three save slots.
- Next
- The core prototype is the next thing to get right: a small grid factory with no story, played in about 20 minutes. Belts, upgrades, undergrounds and priority splitters are in; the next topics are power, a bigger map and what the swarm does as pressure.
- Chapters Four to Six stay on hold until the core is fun. When it is, the story build takes what worked back with it.
- Open question
- Does the core loop stay fun once there are more things to do with the upgrades: power, a bigger map, and the swarm as pressure?
How it's being made
The full devlog- 71versions in the first 20 hours, from the first message at 11:49 pm
- 241notes from me, typed or dictated while I played
- 12,290lines of code, every one written by Claude
- 128devlog 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 128 entries
Play the build
It plays in a desktop browser with a mouse and 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.