Grab Your Torches!

Project intro

Grab Your Torches! is a stop-motion torch-mob adventure for AI Browser Game Jam 5 (theme: TORCH), built in one week. Something has stolen every light in the village of Blackthorn, and Bertha the baker — whose oven fire has burned for forty-one years — leads a mob of thirteen fully voiced neighbours up to Castle Blackspire to take it back. The core rule is that every torch is somebody's light: throwing one leaves that neighbour standing in the dark until the mob passes the flame back, and Bertha herself must always have at least three burning neighbours around her. Each neighbour you wake brings a trick of their own — Old Jeb's pitchfork, Big Gunnar's hammer, Sid's sausage — and three tricks ride on keys 1-3, picked fresh at every bonfire, so the author describes the village as your deck. Four nights each add one rule about light: Night One rallies the village against wolves, Night Two's storm drowns torches and hides a werewolf that only fire can blind, Night Three's gargoyles move only in the dark and freeze to stone in torchlight, and Night Four's skeletons rebuild unless their bones burn while ghosts show only by torchlight. A full run takes about twenty minutes, Night One about five, with two endings at the top of the tower: burn it all, or pass the torch. The build story is unusually well documented: about 17,300 lines of code and tooling written by Claude in Claude Code on PixiJS 8, with a 2.5D diorama stage, a lightmap shader, particle fire and a flocking mob; 500 generated images on Scenario (GPT Image 2.5) with walk poses made as image edits of one reference render per puppet; and 208 voiced lines in 273 takes from 17 ElevenLabs voices plus 90 sound effects and 16 music tracks. Separate Claude agents even played the game as jam jurors across six rounds, lifting its score from 22.5 to 26.0 out of 30. One human, Sven, directed and playtested throughout, and his five-year-old daughter designed the thirteenth neighbour. Honest limits: keyboard and mouse only, best played fullscreen with sound on; this is an itch.io game with no public repository, so no GitHub star count can be verified.