Black-Figure: The Stolen Flame
You do not walk, you turn the vase: sneak Prometheus and the first fire past the gods across eleven painted vessels.
Official site m040xie.itch.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. The developer's own itch.io page (m040xie), linked from its official AI Browser Game Jam 5 submission page.
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- Play free — itch.ioitch.ioReleasedFree
Plays in the browser on itch.io. No download.
Browser (no download) · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Black-Figure: The Stolen Flame
A short stealth puzzle game about Prometheus and the first torch, told across eleven painted vases. Prometheus is painted on a black-figure amphora in a potter's workshop at night and stays in the middle while you turn the vase, and his world, around him: stairs, rivers, temples and the gods themselves. You steal fire from Hephaestus' forge and carry the ember down to the mortals; it cools as you go, so you fan it to keep it alive, but the gods see light rather than you, so glowing inside a god's gaze gets you caught. Each vessel has its own guardian, among them Hera, Apollo who turns, Boreas whose wind fans the ember, Hypnos who wakes at the sound of your steps, Hecate whose torchlight hides yours, and the river Styx. When the fire arrives the vase is fired: the black glaze burns off, the vase turns terracotta and the painting shows what fire gave the people. A finale follows the torch race of the Prometheia, and the vases you fire go into a collection. The solo developer, m040xie, says almost everything was made with AI during the jam by one human directing the tools: Claude (Opus) wrote all of the game code, the art briefs and the pipelines that processed the assets, ChatGPT generated all of the art, and Gemini made the music, while the developer made every design decision, ran every image and sound generation and played every build. Free in the browser on itch.io, about 15 to 20 minutes, with keyboard, mouse or touch; it was entered in AI Browser Game Jam 5.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe itch.io page's “How AI was used” section credits Claude (Anthropic, Opus) with all of the game code: the turning-vase engine, the eleven levels, the gods' rules, the finale's burning glaze, menus and saves. Claude also wrote the brief and layout guide for every picture, the Python pipelines that cut, recoloured, scaled and cleaned the generated art and sound, and a test bot that plays all eleven vases after every change. Per the page, Claude generated idea lists for the theme, built a playable grey-box prototype the same day the human chose the concept, and rebuilt it repeatedly as the human played and redirected it. The page says the human made every design decision, generated every picture and sound and played every build, and that the AI wrote the code, the briefs and the pipelines.
- DeveloperAI Browser Game Jam 5 submission, AI Tools Used: “Claude (Anthropic, Opus) — game code, art briefs and layout guides, Python pipelines that cut, recolour and clean the generated art and sound; QA: a test bot that plays all eleven vases, browser smoke tests and performance checks after every change.” — itch.io (AI Browser Game Jam 5, hosted by Focaccai)
Generated all of the art (Prometheus' sprite sheets, the gods, the mortals' scenes, props, friezes, the vase textures, the title picture and the collection vases) from Claude's briefs, with the human running each generation and choosing results, per the itch.io page. The jam answer also says ChatGPT made “one of the builds of the game”, without saying more.
- DeveloperAI Browser Game Jam 5 submission: “ChatGPT (Plus) — all art: sprites, gods, scenes, props, myth friezes, vase textures, title picture, collection vases; also one of the builds of the game.” — itch.io (AI Browser Game Jam 5, hosted by Focaccai)
Generated the music track “Sly Tiptoe” (Gemini Pro; the prompts were first tried out in Suno), per the itch.io page and the jam answer. Sound effects came from Adobe Firefly and ElevenLabs, and the potter's-wheel loop was mixed by hand in Adobe Audition and iZotope RX.
- DeveloperAI Browser Game Jam 5 submission: “Gemini (Pro) — the music "Sly Tiptoe" (prompts first tried out in Suno).” — itch.io (AI Browser Game Jam 5, hosted by Focaccai)
Made during AI Browser Game Jam 5 (17–31 Oct 2026, theme: Torch) by one person directing several AI tools, per the itch.io page. Claude wrote the browser game code and a prototype the same day the concept was chosen, then rebuilt it as the developer played and redirected it. For each art batch Claude wrote a brief with exact sizes and a layout guide drawn from the game's own numbers; the developer generated the images in ChatGPT and chose them, and Claude measured each sheet's pixels and sent back numbered fix lists. Claude's Python pipelines cut, rescaled and recoloured every picture to the game's two paints, so the finale can fire the whole vase by swapping them; layout problems were fixed in code instead of regenerating. The music was made with Gemini and the sound effects with Adobe Firefly and ElevenLabs. After every change a scripted bot played all eleven vases by their intended solutions and naive strategies had to lose. The page lists what did not work, including editing images in the same ChatGPT chat and a cut-out rig built from AI-drawn body parts. Friends helped with playtesting; the torch race follows Pausanias, Description of Greece 1.30.2.
- Engine / framework
- None (vanilla JavaScript)
- Languages
- JavaScript, Python
- Team size
- 1 (solo)Developer Reporteditch.io
- Initial build time
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“The human made every design decision, generated every picture and sound, and played every build; the AI wrote the code, the briefs, and the pipelines that turned raw generations into game assets.”Verification notes: AI use from the “How AI was used” section and credits on the itch.io page and the AI Tools Used answer on the official AI Browser Game Jam 5 submission page, both re-read on 5 Nov 2026. The page's tool table credits Claude (Opus) with “All game code”; no percentage is given, so no AI code share is recorded. The page names Claude, not Claude Code, so the tool is recorded as Claude. The jam answer's remark that ChatGPT made “one of the builds of the game” is not explained. Team size 1 from the page (“one human directing three kinds of tools”); the credits also thank friends for playtesting. The attached day-by-day AI log file was not opened. Generated art, music and sound were made before release and ship as files; they are not AI running during play, and the build's scripts make no calls to AI services. The story draws on Greek myth and Pausanias, which carry no third-party rights. Publication (30 Oct 2026, 17:24 UTC) from the itch.io page; the page's download section says the game is currently unavailable as a download, while the browser version plays. Jam voting was still open on 5 Nov 2026 (23 ratings so far), so no placement is recorded; itch.io shows no public rating. The game was not played.
Development history
AI Browser Game Jam 5 opens; the developer says the game was made during the jam (17–31 Oct).
Published on itch.io (17:24 UTC) and submitted to AI Browser Game Jam 5 (theme: Torch).
AI Browser Game Jam 5 submissions close; voting was still in progress on 5 Nov 2026.
Officialitch.io (Focaccai)
Game performance
Each figure measures something different — concurrent players, owners, downloads and sales are never interchangeable and are never added together. Labels show where each number comes from.
itch.io
Free in the browser (HTML5), about 15–20 minutes; keyboard, or drag and on-screen buttons with mouse or touch.
Not publicly available: itch.io rating, Gross revenue.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Black-Figure: The Stolen Flame by m040xie itch.io | Store page | Oct 30, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Rate Black-Figure: The Stolen Flame for AI Browser Game Jam 5 itch.io (AI Browser Game Jam 5, hosted by Focaccai) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| AI Browser Game Jam 5 itch.io (Focaccai) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) m040xie | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
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