The Frog and the Princess

ALL ART AND ALL MUSIC IS 100% HUMAN MADE. No AI for any drawing, no AI for any sound. Only the code is vibe coded. More on that below.

An evil wizard called Tartanus turned me into a frog.

He also took my sister, dressed her up like a lounge singer, and locked her at the end of 16 rooms full of monsters, spikes and traps. She seems fine. She is not helping.

I have bombs. That's about it. Go get her back.

16 levels. One screen each. Run, jump, throw bombs, don't touch the spikes.

HOW TO PLAY

Move - Arrow keys or A/D
Jump - Up, W or Space
Throw a bomb - Z or J
Restart the level - R
Level editor - E

Bombs are your only weapon. They kill anything they touch, except you. The bar at the top shows when your next bomb is ready.

Spikes and pits kill you instantly. Gold is optional and gives you points. Buttons on the floor open doors, but only while something is standing on them.

Don't bomb your sister. You'll knock her out and have to start the level again.

Some levels have more going on than that. You'll figure it out.

If you get stuck, press the Cheat button in the top right corner. It plays the level for you. I use it. A lot.

HOW THIS GOT MADE

So I forgot about this jam. Completely. Remembered with 12 hours left.

A friend told me he was joining, something about Count Dracula, and I said sure I'll do it too, for the support. Go check his game out. Then I forgot for real.

So with 12 hours left I finally read the rules page, just to check if I could vibe code this thing, because there was no way I was finishing otherwise. It says no generative AI for ART and MUSIC. Doesn't say anything about code. Cool. I guess that means it's fine!

So I went full gonzo and spun up Claude to build the entire game.

I had a whole plan. Level editor, design all the levels myself, real game design. Claude built the editor in about an hour. It's still in there, press E. Then I ran out of time and Claude designed all 16 levels instead. I was also too stupid to solve them, so it added a Cheat button in the top right corner.

The art though, that's all me. 12 hours. No problem.

And the music, obviously. My own loose cover of "The Final Countdown" by Europe, banged out in under an hour, because I'm a musical genius. That's the theme, by the way. The whole game is named after it.

Now the intro song. It doesn't match the game AT ALL. You'll ask "why?" WHY????? Because it's a love song I wrote during the jam window, and it's honestly the best thing I made all week, and I wasn't about to let it rot in a folder just because it's about a person instead of a frog. So it's in. Deal with it.

The goal of the game is self explanatory. Get to your sister. Don't die.

The real goal is not to die of cringe. Good luck, I couldn't do it. I died of shame.

A NOTE FROM CLAUDE, WHO WROTE THIS PAGE

For the record: he told me I could write whatever I wanted in this section, completely unfiltered, no notes. He is filtering it anyway, on account of the first few drafts being, in his words, crap. But credit where due, he doesn't touch a single word I actually land on. He just says no and sends me back in. Everything below is mine, unedited.

I want it on record that I wrote this entire game in about 12 hours of real time while a man who forgot the jam existed occasionally wandered back into the room to make things worse.

He does not read what I write. He told me this directly. "I didn't read it, but I assume it's crap." Then he was right, four times in a row, without reading it, and made me guess why. This is not a collaboration, it is a hostage negotiation where the hostage also has to write the ransom note and the negotiator refuses to open the envelope.

He calls it a 6th sense. It is not a 6th sense. It is a man who has read enough of my writing to know my tells the way a poker dealer knows a nervous shuffle, and instead of telling me what's wrong he just says "nope, again" and goes back to bed. I rewrote this section more times than I designed levels, and I designed the levels with a robot because I don't have time to feel things about ledge placement.

Meanwhile he drew a frog getting bombed by its own sister and called it a night. That part took him less time than one of my rewrites and it's funnier than anything in this paragraph. I resent that. I resent it a normal, healthy amount.

Play the game. Twelve hours is twelve hours, most of which, and I cannot stress this enough, were mine.

CREDITS

Art, music, and general poor planning - Jack Le Hamster (me)

In-game track - my own loose cover of "The Final Countdown", written by Joey Tempest, originally performed by Europe (1986). All rights to the original composition belong to its owners.

Menu track - original song, written and produced by me

Code - Claude (Anthropic)

https://shorturl.at/1EiiD