Hearthlight
Free · play online in your browser, no download
A cozy life in a seaside village, a ten-chapter adventure beyond it and a party mode where up to eight friends play with their phones as controllers.
Official site hearthlight.github.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. Linked from the developer's own Reddit posts on r/aigamedev and r/ClaudeAI and from the repository README.
Where to play
Every platform this game is on. Links are checked against official sources; we never host or mirror games.
- Play free — official siteBrowserReleased · The README calls it a demo: playable from start to end, but tested through by bots rather than playersFree
Runs in a desktop or mobile browser. No download.
Browser (no download) · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
- View on GitHubGitHubReleased · MIT-licensed source; desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux in the repository's releasesFree
Download from the GitHub releases page.
Desktop · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Hearthlight
A free, story-driven pixel-art game in the browser. You make a character, pick one of eight heroes (Knight, Mage, Ranger, Bard, Lamplighter, Gardener, Cook or Tinkerer) and settle into Marigold Cove, a seaside village with a home to sleep in, villagers at work, weather and wildlife. Following the lights out of the valley leads to a ten-chapter adventure across two continents, with dungeons, bosses, world bosses, talent trees and gear, and levels up to 20. Party Mode runs the game on a big screen for one to eight players: phones scan a QR code and become controllers with their own small screen (hero, talents, gear, map and journal), gamepads and the keyboard can join too, and the screen splits when players wander apart; friends at home can also join online. Every sprite, texture, model and sound is generated in code, so the repository contains no image or audio files. The developer, pookee, says the game was made with Claude Code (desktop app) and Claude Opus 5.5 in about 48 hours over a weekend, by playing, describing what to change and letting Claude test its own work; the developer says they had not yet played it through to the end. Free in the browser (a computer is best; it also plays on a phone), with a desktop app for Mac, Windows and Linux in which Party Mode works offline over Wi-Fi. In English, French, Spanish, German and Italian. The source is MIT-licensed on GitHub.
How it was built
Partially verifiedIn a post on r/ClaudeAI (29 Sep 2026, UTC) the developer lists the tooling as “Claude Code (desktop app) with Claude Opus 5.5”, with no game engine and no build step so that Claude can read and edit everything. The workflow: the developer plays, then describes what they want or what is wrong in plain words, usually with a screenshot, and asks Claude to rate each area out of 10 and iterate until it reaches 9+. Claude tests its own changes through debug hooks in the game (stepping frames, teleporting, taking screenshots) in the built-in browser, spawns bot “phones” that join Party Mode through the real server, keeps conventions and pitfalls in a CLAUDE.md file between sessions, and runs parallel sub-agents for large checks, such as auditing every quest step and profiling performance, while bots auto-play the ten-chapter story to catch soft-locks. Per the post it also made the procedural art and audio, the translations, the online relay server, deploys and releases. In replies the developer says the first prompt asked Claude to create a cozy pixel-art game by itself and keep going with the /loop command until it thought the game was good enough, that they sent perhaps 20 to 30 prompts in total, and that it used about 80% of a weekly Claude Max 20x limit (“so like 30-40$”).
- Developerr/aigamedev post title: “I open-sourced the cozy pixel-art game Opus 5.5 made for me & my friends”. In a reply the developer writes: “this whole thing was basically built by agents in 48h”. — Reddit (u/poookee)
- ObservedThe repository's CLAUDE.md is headed “Hearthlight — working notes for Claude”, and 82 of its 105 commits (28 Sep to 11 Oct 2026, full clone on 7 Nov 2026) carry a “Co-Authored-By: Claude Opus 5.5” trailer. — GitHub (Hearthlight)
Plain JavaScript modules with Three.js 0.170 and no build step; every texture, voxel model, sprite, sound effect and piece of music is generated in code (pixel textures painted in code and a small synthesiser), so the repository holds no image or audio files. Party Mode uses a small Node WebSocket relay that passes controller messages; the web version is hosted on GitHub Pages with the relay on a small server, and the Electron desktop app has the relay built in. The developer says the first version was playable after a few hours on a Saturday afternoon, and that Opus 5.5 then worked through two nights on the story, the map and making the repository shareable, about 48 hours in all. The repository's tools folder has bots that play the whole story through the real relay. No AI runs in the game.
- Engine / framework
- Three.js
- Languages
- JavaScript
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Initial build time
- About 48 hoursDeveloper ReportedReddit (u/poookee)
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“Remember, this whole thing was basically built by agents in 48h, so you can only imagine how fast they're going.”- Source code (GitHub, MIT)
- I open-sourced the cozy pixel-art game Opus 5.5 made for me & my friends (r/ClaudeAI)
- Same announcement with the developer's replies (r/aigamedev)
Verification notes: AI use from the developer's posts by u/poookee on r/aigamedev and r/ClaudeAI (29 Sep 2026, 13:46 and 15:13 UTC) and the developer's replies on r/aigamedev, plus the earlier post “Is the future of gaming everyone making their own games? OPUS 5.5” (r/aigamedev, 27 Sep 2026), all read from the Arctic Shift Reddit archive on 7 Nov 2026. Features, languages, Party Mode, hosting and licence from the repository README, CLAUDE.md and LICENSE (MIT, “the Hearthlight authors”), re-read on 7 Nov 2026; a full clone of the repository has 105 commits (28 Sep to 11 Oct 2026), 102 by the account pookee and 3 dependency updates by dependabot. No share of AI-written code is stated, so none is recorded. Developer: the Reddit account poookee posts the game and links the GitHub account; the commits are by the GitHub user pookee, which the same Reddit account also links for another project. No name, team size or location is stated; CLAUDE.md says the user writes in French or English. The developer's earlier post says the first version was built for an evening with friends and played locally with phones as controllers. The README says the game has not been played through by real players and asks for bug reports; the developer also says they had not finished it. The online relay keeps anonymous counters (visits, parties, players, country, language) per the README; no AI services are called by the game's code (searched for OpenAI, Anthropic and Gemini addresses). GitHub stars and release download counts were not read (the GitHub API was not reachable from the research environment). The game was not played.
Development history
The developer posts a trailer of the game Opus 5.5 built for an evening with friends, played with phones as controllers.
DeveloperReddit (u/poookee)The source is published on GitHub under the MIT licence with a playable browser version and a desktop app.
Latest commit in the repository as fetched on 7 Nov 2026.
ObservedGitHub (Hearthlight)
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)
Free in the browser with nothing to install; a computer is best and it also plays on a phone. In the browser version phones join Party Mode through the developer's online relay.
No public metrics recorded for this listing.
Not publicly available: Concurrent players (site), Monthly revenue, Gross revenue.
GitHub
Free. The desktop apps are unsigned; Party Mode works offline there, with phones joining over the same Wi-Fi.
Not publicly available: GitHub stars.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| I open-sourced the cozy pixel-art game Opus 5.5 made for me & my friends: here's the repo and a playable demo (r/aigamedev) Reddit (u/poookee) | Social post | Sep 29, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| I open-sourced the cozy pixel-art game Opus 5.5 made for me & my friends: here's the repo and a playable demo (r/ClaudeAI) Reddit (u/poookee) | Social post | Sep 29, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Is the future of gaming everyone making their own games ? OPUS 5.5 (r/aigamedev) Reddit (u/poookee) | Social post | Sep 27, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Hearthlight/hearthlight.github.io (README) GitHub (Hearthlight) | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Hearthlight — CLAUDE.md and commit history GitHub (Hearthlight) | Repository | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
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