Reptile Catcher

Reptile Catcher is a pixel-art catching game: you go out to catch lizards by stunning them, sell them, and breed them for prettier patterns. The loop is deliberately simple — catch, sell, breed — and the game is designed as one straight run that ends in four to six hours, with no failing state, no prestige system and no offline progress; the author removed auto-catching, auto-selling and the fame tree during development because they did not fit that shape.

The development story is the interesting part. The author built the working catch-sell-breed loop in five minutes from a template, then had Claude Code build a balance simulator in which a bot plays the game — later split into five bot personalities (buy attack first, buy cheapest, breed only, and more) — so every price change could be judged on numbers like "4h 19m to the ending (bot)". The pixel sprites came from PixelLab, connected to Claude through MCP: Claude generated candidates and the author picked them, noting things like "number 3, but make the neck shorter", and recorded each picked sprite's seed. The demo scope was cut in a single day, but the actual release followed on October 11 after Claude added four bosses, drew the area backgrounds and fixed the demo-lock bugs.

The author states it plainly in his dev.to build log: "It runs on Godot, and Claude Code wrote the code. My part was setting the direction, playtesting, and picking the assets." The demo is free to play in the browser on itch.io.