Inkfall3D boss fight in ink wash
- WASDMove
- JLMBSlash
- KEHeavy
- LRMBParry
- SpaceDodge
- RHeal
- EscPause
- Gamepad
- Touch
Inkfall is a third-person boss fight in ink wash: one swordsman against Mojiao, a serpent of living ink, on a frozen lake. One run takes three to five minutes.
- 3,004lines of code
- 14generated images
- 1model from image to 3D
- 0audio files
- 5.9 MBdownload
After it loads, the game runs in your browser and makes no network requests.
Trailer
What's inside
A swordsman and a three-phase serpent
Three-hit combo, heavy cut, dash slash, roll, parry and three gourds of medicine against Mojiao, whose bites, sweeps, ice dives and red strokes all show a tell before they land.
A moving ink painting
A hand-written ink pipeline: three ink tones, dry-brush edges, depth outlines, paper grain and snow, on ice that mirrors the fight and keeps every splash.
Hits you can feel
Hit-stop, screen shake and ink thrown on the paper. A clean parry slows time, a broken posture brings the mask down, and the last cut plays from three fixed cameras.
Sound with no audio files
Taiko, plucked strings, flute and every blade, step and roar are synthesized live in the browser. The score adds layers as the phases turn.
How it was made
Lock the look with one key visual
Before any code, one image set the rules for everything after it: paper white, ink and a single red, a swordsman seen from behind, a serpent of ink behind a bone mask.
Image
Generate art the game can use as is
Ten images on pure white: three layers of mountains as long scrolls, a sheet of ink splashes, a sheet of brush strokes and the mask concept. Brightness becomes transparency in the game, so nothing needed cutting out.
Image
Turn the mask into 3D and borrow the moves
The mask concept became a textured 3D model, and a script marked its jaw so it can open. The swordsman uses a CC0 animation library trimmed to 27 moves. His hat, cloak, scarf and blade are code.
Image to 3D
Claude Fable 5.2 writes the game
One brief produced a build that played from title to result. Three more rounds, each judged on real screenshots, replaced bare geometry with brush strokes, added scale and tuned how hits feel.
Claude Fable 5.2
The game tests and films itself
A bot that plays through the input layer clears the fight in a headless browser, so every change is checked in about a minute. The trailer is real gameplay captured frame by frame, with no video generation.
Who did what
- Concept, plan and code
- Claude Fable 5.2 set the concept, the brief for the key visual and the technical plan, then wrote all of the code in one session over four rounds.
- Images
- GPT Image 2.6: 14 images, 9 of them used in the game. The same model is on PopNow.
- The serpent's mask
- Tripo H3.1, image to 3D, for 576 credits. The same model is on PopNow.
- The swordsman
- Quaternius Universal Animation Library (CC0) for the body and moves. His clothes and blade are code.
- Music and sound
- Synthesized in code with Web Audio. No music or sound generation, no audio files.
- Trailer
- Captured frame by frame from the running game. No video generation.
Make one like it in Claude
Connect PopNow to Claude and describe your game. Claude writes the code and calls PopNow for the art.
Credits and licenses
| Name | License | Used for |
|---|---|---|
| three.js 0.187.0 | MIT | 3D engine and the loaders for the two models |
| Quaternius Universal Animation Library 1 and 2 | CC0 1.0 | The swordsman's skeleton and 27 animations |
| Ma Shan Zheng | SIL OFL 1.1 | Brush lettering for the title, phase names and hit characters |
| Cormorant Garamond | SIL OFL 1.1 | All English interface text |
