Playing games

We shipped a new product in 5 weeks right after I told the team we were sunsetting a different product.

I wanted to celebrate them properly. Not with a Slack message or a calendar invite that says "Launch Celebration" with an agenda full of metrics. I wanted something that felt like what the experience actually was... a journey.

So I built a pixel art game.

I'm not a developer. I am creative and I use Claude Code every day. I wanted to see what Claude and I could build to help celebrate the team.

I designed a top-down ocean map with seven islands. I'd advance through each island with the spacebar, and at each stop, a pixel art vignette would play and I would narrate the adventure.

The whole thing is a single HTML file. 1,664 lines. No frameworks, no build step, no dependencies. You open it in Chrome, press F for fullscreen, and press spacebar to advance. I built it in one session with Claude Code.

Kept the tech simple. Afterall, this isn't for production or distrubution. HTML5 canvas at 480x270 pixels, scaled up with crisp pixel rendering. A state machine handles the 15-press sequence from title to credits. Every character, every island, every wave is drawn with canvas rectangles. No images, no sprites, no external files.

I'm not going to pretend the pixel art is museum-quality. The characters are 10 pixels tall. But on a Zoom screen share, with me narrating the story behind each scene, it worked.

That's the part that mattered. The game was just the door. It gave people a shared visual reference for a journey most of the org hadn't been close to.

It turned "we shipped a product" into "we went on this specific journey together and came out the other side."

I keep thinking about what celebration actually looks like in remote, distributed companies. A Slack thread with party emojis isn't it. A slide deck with metrics isn't it either.

The best celebrations I've seen do two things: they tell the real story (including the hard parts), and they put the people at the center.

A pixel art game is a weird way to do that. But the weirdness is kind of the point. You don't need to build a game. But find something that isn't a template. Your team will notice the difference.