Quest for Gravy I: So You Want to Be a Thief
Free · play online in your browser, no download
A short EGA-style stealth caper: an oversized Persian cat sneaks past the vet clinic's night-shift cleaning robot to reach the gravy on top of the fridge.
Official site havocy28.itch.io, verified Nov 3, 2026. The developer's own itch.io page (havocy28), linked from its official Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 submission page.
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Plays in the browser on itch.io. No download.
Browser (no download) · Desktop · Mobile · Official link verified Nov 3, 2026.
About Quest for Gravy I: So You Want to Be a Thief
A short stealth comedy in the look of late-1980s PC adventures: 320×200 pixels, EGA colours, a narrator with opinions about everything, points for doing cat things and nine lives to spend. It is Friday night at a vet clinic; Duchess, a Persian roughly the size of an ottoman, is boarding overnight, her kennel latch didn't catch, and someone has left out gravy. Between her and the gravy is Dustin, the clinic's new overnight cleaning robot, who sees everything on the floor and puts escaped patients back in their kennels but never looks up, so benches, counters, shelves and the exam table are safe and getting between them is the hard part. You can crouch in the dark, knock pens, jars and tins off counters to send Dustin to look, follow wisps of gravy smell when lost, and grow Agility and Stealth as you play; the gravy sits on the fridge, which needs Agility 10, and the night ends with a ride home and a score out of 100. Following the jam's restriction, every input moves the cat: choices are places, such as three cat flaps that pick your class. A night takes about 20 minutes. The developer, havocy28 (Brian Hur), says Claude wrote all of the code in Lua for LÖVE, including Dustin's behaviour, plus the narrator's lines, the music and sound effects through an FM synth it wrote, every sprite drawn in code and the font, while ChatGPT's image generation painted the five room backgrounds and the cover from prompts Claude wrote. Made for Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 (theme: Cat and Robot); free on itch.io in the browser, or as a Windows download or a .love file for macOS and Linux.
How it was built
Partially verifiedThe jam answer: “Claude (Anthropic) built the game with me. It wrote all of the code (Lua, in LÖVE), including Dustin's behavior, plus the narrator's lines, the music and sound effects (through an FM synth it wrote), every sprite (drawn in code), the font and the build scripts.” Per the itch.io page, Claude also designed the game with the developer, measured the room maps from the paintings, wrote the scripts that convert each painting to the 1989 EGA palette and cut out the props that can be knocked over, and wrote bots that play every room without a screen on each build to check that every exit can be reached and the points add up to 100. The robot is a hand-tuned state machine, not AI. No model or interface is named.
- Developeritch.io page: “Claude (Anthropic) designed the game with Brian and wrote all of the code (Lua, in LÖVE), including Dustin's behavior.” Team: “Brian Hur and Claude. Brian directed, playtested, chose the art and edited the writing.” — itch.io
- DeveloperDevlog “Skipping the crank”: everything that moves is drawn by Claude pixel by pixel in Lua, and the music comes from an FM synth Claude wrote; signed “Made with Claude (code, words, music, sprites) and ChatGPT (the painted rooms and cover)”. — havocy28 (itch.io)
- OfficialJam rule 1: AI must genuinely be part of the build (code, art, audio, writing, design or a live system), and entrants must say what they used and where. — itch.io (dg)
ChatGPT's image generation painted the five room backgrounds and the cover from prompts Claude wrote; Claude's scripts then converted them to the EGA palette. The sources do not say ChatGPT wrote any code.
Brian Hur directed, playtested, chose the art and edited the writing; Claude wrote the code in Lua for the LÖVE framework and made the sprites, font, music and sound in code. The developer paints each room with ChatGPT from a prompt Claude writes, and Claude's scripts turn the painting into an EGA picture, remove what the game should not show and cut out the props. On every build, bots play the whole night without a screen. No AI runs in the game; the robot Dustin is a hand-tuned state machine. The web version runs through love.js.
- Engine / framework
- LÖVE
- Languages
- Lua
- Team size
- Not disclosed
- Initial build time
- Not disclosed
- Development time
- Not disclosed
- Development cost
- Not disclosed
- AI-written code
- Not disclosed
“It wrote all of the code (Lua, in LÖVE), including Dustin's behavior”Verification notes: Story, gameplay, controls, downloads, credits and AI use from the developer's itch.io page (status Released; HTML5, Windows, macOS and Linux; made with LÖVE; languages English; AI disclosure ticks Code, Graphics, Sounds and Text), the devlog “Skipping the crank” (4 Oct 2026) and the answers on the official Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 submission page, all re-read on 5 Nov 2026. The itch.io page shows no publication date; the jam page shows the game was submitted 4 days and 12 hours before the 9 Oct 2026 07:00 UTC deadline, i.e. on 4 Oct 2026, the same day as the devlog. The jam team list reads “Brian Hur, and Claude (Anthropic)” and the page credits “Brian Hur and Claude”; the itch.io account is havocy28, the same account that made Sconce, so the existing developer entry is used. Team size is not recorded as a number because the sources list Claude as a team member and give no human headcount beyond Brian. The answers credit Claude with all of the code but give no percentage, so no AI code share is recorded. The page calls the game “a short stealth caper in the spirit of the old Sierra games” and tags it sierra; it names no Sierra game or asset, so no IP notice is recorded. The characters Duchess, Gary and Barb first appeared in the developer's earlier Playdate game Vet's Quest I: The Lump, per the page and the devlog. Jamference (2 to 9 Oct 2026, theme Cat and Robot, restriction Movement Input Only; 36 entries) has published results: #17 overall (score 3.606) from 11 ratings, with Overall and Polish (#17) the best placings. The browser build (love.js wrapper and game files) was checked for calls to AI services and none were found. itch.io shows no public rating and no download count. Location is not stated. We did not play the game.
Development history
Submitted to Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 (theme: Cat and Robot), 4 days and 12 hours before the deadline; the first devlog is posted the same day.
Jamference voting ends (07:00 UTC); results: #17 overall out of 36 entries, from 11 ratings.
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, via love.js), or as a Windows download (4.7 MB) or a .love file for macOS and Linux that needs LÖVE 11.5. Keyboard or gamepad; on a phone or tablet held sideways, an on-screen pad and three buttons appear.
Not publicly available: itch.io rating, Gross revenue.
Reviews & rankings
Not yet reviewed by our editors.
Not currently ranked.
Sources
| Source | Type | Published | Accessed |
|---|---|---|---|
| Quest for Gravy I: So You Want to Be a Thief by havocy28 itch.io | Store page | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Skipping the crank (Quest for Gravy I devlog) havocy28 (itch.io) | Devlog | Oct 4, 2026 | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Quest for Gravy I: So You Want to Be a Thief for Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 (submission and results) itch.io (Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1, hosted by dg) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
| Jamference: AI Game Jam Hack 1 itch.io (dg) | Official site | Not confirmed | Nov 3, 2026 |
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