GRAVEWAKE
A dark fantasy twin-stick shooter for phones: a lone wizard in a dead clearing at midnight against waves of undead, a Lich and a Bone Colossus. The developer vibe-coded it with Opus 5.5 in Claude Code from one prompt and a handful more.
Official site shiny-guru.itch.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked as “Play it” in the README of the developer's repository LioraLabs/gravewake and from the developer's blog post on lioralabs.dev.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — itch.ioitch.ioReleasedFree
Plays in the browser on itch.io. No download.
Browser (no download) · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
- View on GitHubGitHubReleased · Source code (TypeScript, Three.js, KDL content files, Blender model scripts; MIT licence)Free
Source code repository, not a place to play.
Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About GRAVEWAKE
GRAVEWAKE is a free dark fantasy twin-stick shooter made for phones and playable in the browser on itch.io. You are a wizard alone in a dead forest clearing at midnight while the dead climb out of the ground: skeletons, ghouls, banshees, a necromancer that heals the others, grave wardens, archers that paint you with a line before they fire, and bulwarks behind a shield. Hold the phone in landscape: your left thumb walks and your right thumb aims and casts, and each stick appears wherever your thumb lands; on a computer, WASD moves and the mouse aims and casts. Between waves you pick a boon, the Lich arrives at wave 5 and a Bone Colossus after it, and the game can be added to the home screen to run fullscreen. The developer, Liora Labs, describes it as an experiment in vibecoding video games with Opus 5.5: one prompt in a fresh Claude Code instance produced the first playable game (a neon arena shooter called PRISMFALL) in about forty minutes, and a handful of further prompts, each to a fresh agent, added an ice wave and a sniper enemy, rebalanced the bulwark and turned the whole game into the undead theme. The developer says the agents wrote the TypeScript code and the Blender model scripts, while the developer set the house rules (packaged as a Claude Code plugin) that keep every enemy, wave, colour and screen in readable text files. Free on itch.io; the MIT-licensed source is on GitHub.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe README calls GRAVEWAKE an experiment in vibecoding video games with Opus 5.5: one prompt for the first playable game, a handful more to reshape it, and a set of house rules, the game-bible plugin for Claude Code, that kept every change readable. In the blog post the developer says they put those rules into a skill, opened a fresh Claude Code instance in an empty folder and typed one prompt asking for a twin-stick shooter for mobile devices; about forty minutes later it returned PRISMFALL, a neon arena game with thirteen enemies, two bosses, ten waves, upgrades and synthesised audio, with 182 unit tests and 23 Storybook tests. Three short requests, each to a fresh agent with only the repository, the catalogue and the skill, added an ice wave, a sniper enemy and a fairer bulwark. A retheme prompt then turned the game into GRAVEWAKE, with a separate critic subagent comparing screenshots against reference images in a loop for an hour and forty-five minutes; the post says the rules files stayed byte-identical while models, view code, palette and content changed. The developer writes that the theory was to rarely need to read the generated TypeScript, leaving the programming to the agents, and that one more prompt produced the trailer. The itch.io page's AI disclosure tags code, graphics, sounds and text.
- DeveloperBlog: “I should rarely need to read the generated TypeScript myself … Agents are already very good at programming, and I'm happy to leave that domain to them.” and “opened up a fresh claude code instance in an empty folder and typed one prompt”. — Liora Labs
- Developeritch.io AI disclosure: AI Assisted; Code, Graphics, Sounds, Text. — itch.io
Everything a designer might change lives in plain text: enemies, waves, boons, the arena and sounds in KDL files, every colour and the night's look (fog, moonlight, glow) as CSS tokens, and screens as KDL plus CSS read by a small CSS engine in the repository. Each enemy is a few properties plus behaviour words (such as keep-away, spiral, burst, summon or snipe), each defined once as a small pure function; the Lich boss has no special code. The rules are a pure functional TypeScript core with Three.js rendering, input and audio as a thin shell. Every model is a Python script for headless Blender that exports glTF. Storybook stories mount the real renderer for each enemy and situation, with play functions that check each signature move, and a bot plays 30 runs and reports what killed it. The blog says the developer was playing the game on a phone about three hours in.
- Engine / framework
- Three.js (TypeScript)
- Languages
- TypeScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Initial build time
- About 3 hours to playing it on a phone; the first playable version (PRISMFALL) took about 40 minutesDeveloper ReportedLiora Labs
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“I should rarely need to read the generated TypeScript myself.”Verification notes: AI use, the prompts and the build process come from the README (read through raw.githubusercontent.com) and the developer's blog post (dated 29 Sep 2026), both read on 4 Nov 2026; the MIT licence is from the LICENSE file (© 2026 Liora Labs). The itch.io page (account shiny_guru; status Released; HTML5; genre Action; tag Twin Stick Shooter) has no description text and does not link back to Liora Labs; the tie rests on the README and blog linking it. The itch.io publish date is not shown; the build's version stamp corresponds to 30 Sep 2026, 01:57 UTC, and the blog post already links the itch.io page, so no release date is recorded. The model is named in the README (Opus 5.5); the blog names Claude Code. The blog quotes the developer's own visual references for the retheme; they are prompts to the agent, and no names or assets of other games were found, so no IP notice is recorded. The itch.io build's script was checked for calls to AI services and none were found. itch.io shows no public rating and no download counts. github.com and the GitHub API were not used. The game was not played.
Development history
The developer publishes the blog post on how GRAVEWAKE was built with Claude Code, linking the game on itch.io and the source on GitHub.
DeveloperLiora Labs
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; plays in the browser (HTML5), made for phones in landscape, with keyboard and mouse on a computer.
Not publicly available: itch.io rating, Gross revenue.
GitHub
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Not publicly available: GitHub stars.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| LioraLabs/gravewake — README GitHub (LioraLabs) | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Agentic Speed, Human Control in Game Dev Liora Labs | Devlog | Sep 29, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| GRAVEWAKE by shiny_guru itch.io | Store page | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Official game page (language check) Liora Labs (shiny_guru) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
