Writing / en Pippin is a short point-and-click game I made for a game jam. Nell gets her grandmother’s old cabinet. Each of its five drawers holds a tiny living model of a place, and a slider moves that place through time.
I didn’t write any of it. Claude Code wrote the code, the story and the dialogue. The voices and music came from ElevenLabs. The whole repo history is five days long.
Five drawers #
Each drawer covers a different stretch of time.
You can also walk inside. There are 16 rooms, and they follow the slider too.
There are no image files #
My first question was where the art came from. There is no art folder. Every pixel is placed by code.
Each scene is built out of colored points in 3D: boxes, roofs, cylinders, tree canopies. The farm alone is 66,414 points. Here it is drawn point by point, in the order the code adds them:
A point on its own is just one color. The look comes from a few cheap tricks stacked on top of each other: each material has one base color, each face of a box gets darker the more it faces away from the light, and every point picks a slightly different shade from its material at random. Things that move, like the cows, the windmill and falling leaves, are drawn fresh every frame on top.
To decide which point is in front, the renderer keeps a second image next to the colors: how far away each pixel is.
The whole farm is only 388 by 243 pixels, scaled up with sharp edges. Zoom in and you can count them.
Time is one number #
Every scene is a function of one number, the slider, from 0 to 1. On the farm, that number times 12 is the month. Trees, snow, crops and the sky all read it, so moving the slider is just drawing the same scene again with a different number.
Hints that point somewhere #
Stuck players get a Hint button in three steps: a nudge, then where to look, then an arrow on the exact thing. A test plays the whole game and checks after every step that the hint points at something, so it can never send you nowhere.
What I actually did #
Prompting. =))
Pippin is free on [itch.io](https://th1nhng0.itch.io/pippin) and takes about an hour.