Bokken

Project intro

Bokken is a game where you craft custom weapons and tools with pixels, then use them in a 2D physics engine based around weight, balance, momentum, and sharpness and bluntness. You directly control your arms to swing and thrust your weapon and destroy the environment, your enemies, and even their weapons right out of their hands. There are no weapon types: mass, balance, edges, points and where you grip it all come from the pixels you carve and hone. A crooked branch fights like a crooked branch. A stone lashed to a haft fights like an axe or a club. A sharp piece of obsidian mounted on a long shaft feels like a spear. A wooden sword (or bokken) feels like a wooden sword. Cross the island to face the Master waiting on the far shore. On the way are a bandit in the forest, a monk who holds the river's ford, and the Oni of the pass. Rest at fires to heal and pass the night, burn wood to keep them going, and carve, hone and rebuild your weapon as it chips and breaks. Wood shavings matter: every pixel of wood you carve becomes a shaving, and to light a fire you need 4 shavings and a piece of wood in your hand to burn. Bigger is not always better: small, light weapons can be very effective, heavier weapons swing slower and hit harder, and a heavy weapon whose balance point is far from your hand droops unless you keep the balance point near the grip or hold it with two hands. The game was made in one week by one person with AI assistance: the author designed the game, set its rules, and judged every feel, look and sound by hand on a phone, a pad and a mouse, while Claude Code (Anthropic) wrote the code, the design documents from the author's notes, the tools and the tests, and integrated it all. Note the cover art is a separate Grok Imagine image, disclosed on the jam page; the in-game visuals are pixel-crafted. Best played in landscape orientation; the author warns it may not function well or at all in portrait on mobile. Made for Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 2, free in the browser.