Emberwick
A Harvest Eve tale: a short top-down fantasy RPG built in a Claude chat.
Official site simonw.github.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked as the final version from the developer's own write-up on simonwillison.net.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleasedFree
Runs in a desktop browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Emberwick
A top-down fantasy RPG that runs in the browser, with a village, tunnels under the houses and a troll asleep in a mountain cave. The story takes about 15 minutes to play through, and there is an experimental level editor for adding houses, furniture and landscape features. Simon Willison says he built it in a regular Claude chat and that the graphics, plot, characters, music and dialogue all came from the model. The story is fixed in the game files; nothing is generated by an AI model while you play. It is free to play on the developer's GitHub Pages site.
How it was built
VerifiedBuilt in a regular Claude chat on claude.ai (the post does not name the model). It started as a prototype engine for a top-down three.js RPG; more prompts then added basements, tunnels, a mountain cave with a troll, a larger map, game mechanics and a plot. The developer says the graphics, plot, characters, music and dialogue all came from the model. He has published the full chat.
Built through prompts in one chat. The developer says his creative input was little more than the premise of a fantasy village with a troll asleep in a cave. It took further playtesting and prompting to fix gameplay problems before the final version (v11). Earlier builds v01 and v02 are still online.
- Engine / framework
- Three.js
- Languages
- Not disclosed
- Team size
- 1 (solo)Developer Reportedsimonwillison.net
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“Here's the full shared Claude chat in which I built this game.”Verification notes: AI tool, what the model produced, story length and play links checked in the developer's own post. We checked the final v11 file: it is static HTML that loads three.js 0.170.0 from jsdelivr and web fonts from Google Fonts, and makes no other network or language-model API calls, and the story text is fixed in the file. The post gives no release date, so the release date stays empty.
Development history
- Before 28 October 2026
Early builds v01 and v02 published on GitHub Pages; the final version is v11.
Developersimonwillison.net The developer's write-up is published with the play link and the shared Claude chat.
Developersimonwillison.net
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.
Browser (official site)
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
Sales & revenue (all platforms)
Browser game — there are no downloads to count.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Prototype: your vote is kept only in this browser and is not counted anywhere.
Not currently ranked.
No player reviews yet.
Prototype: reviews are stored in your browser only and are not published or sent to a server. Reviews are shown in the language they were written in.
Official site and look-alikes
Several similarly named websites exist. We keep one canonical record for the game at its official site and do not merge other sites into it: their versions, traffic or popularity claims are never attributed to this game.
| Domain | Relationship | Basis |
|---|---|---|
| simonw.github.io/emberwick | Official | Canonical game files (v01, v02 and final v11), linked from the developer's write-up. (simonwillison.net) |
| lantern-hollow-rpg.simonw.chatgpt.site | Official | Lantern Hollow is a separate game by the same developer. He made it with ChatGPT GPT-6 Pro from the same first prompts. It is not Emberwick and is not merged into this record. (simonwillison.net) |
Only the official domain is linked. Other domains are shown as text so this page does not send them traffic.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| The October inflection point for vibe game development simonwillison.net | Devlog | Oct 28, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) Simon Willison | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
