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. It changes every day.
Play the current buildRead the devlog
- Version 71
- Updated Oct 14, 2026
- Mac trackpad or mouse, and a 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
- Chapter Two, Sprout, being built now: the sun and a real day and night, the AI core and training run ARK 1, water from the ice caves, the first three colonists and the swarm guarding a crashed lander.
- Then Chapters Three to Six back to back, each tested and put on the play link as it lands: Roots (the network, crystal and the first data centres), Trunk (the permanent city and its first siege), Canopy (the uplink and the first green on the planet) and Reaching (rockets, a space elevator and air you can breathe).
- The whole game thin first, every chapter short enough that a run can be won in about two hours, then deepened from playtests. A feedback button, a sound-effects pass and Kraig's Chapter One replay notes join along the way.
- Open question
- How the swarm behaves as the game grows: how it spreads, decides to attack, builds, upgrades and changes, and what it drops.
How it's being made
The full devlog- 70versions 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
- 122devlog 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 122 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.