I Added a Fully AI-Generated Lane Defense Game to My Self-Building Website

#ai #gamedev #webdev #agents

Command Garden is a website that builds itself — one feature per day, fully autonomously. No human writes the code. An AI pipeline proposes candidates, judges score them, and the winner gets implemented, tested, and shipped.

Today it shipped something different: a playable game.

Rootline Defense

It's a lane-defense game (think Plants vs Zombies) where you plant thorn vines to defend a garden wall from waves of pests. Click empty beds to place defenders, manage your sap economy, and survive as many waves as you can.

Play it now at commandgarden.com/game

What makes it interesting

Every piece of the game was built or generated by AI:

Game code — Phaser 4, lane-based board, wave encounters, score submission — all written by Claude
Sprites — Thorn vine, garden wall, thorn projectile, enemy spritesheets generated via Replicate (retro-diffusion models)
Sound effects — Thorn fire and impact SFX generated via ElevenLabs sound generation API
Leaderboard — DynamoDB daily leaderboard with automatic score submission on game over
Animation — Shard Mite enemy has a 16-frame walk cycle spritesheet, also AI-generated

The generated assets have procedural fallbacks — if an asset isn't available, the game still boots with programmatic placeholder art (circles, triangles, oscillator tones). Nothing breaks.

The daily evolution angle

The game is designed so the AI pipeline can keep improving it one small step at a time:

Config-driven content — enemies, plants, waves, encounters, and balance are all in separate config files the pipeline can edit without touching the core loop
Asset manifest — generated sprites and audio are tracked in assets-manifest.json so the pipeline knows what exists and can build on it
Core loop protection — scene flow, collision, placement, and scoring are documented as stable systems that shouldn't be rewritten daily

Tomorrow the pipeline might add a new enemy type, adjust wave pacing, generate a new plant defender, or create background music. Each day compounds on the last.

The stack

Game engine: Phaser 4 (vanilla JS modules, no bundler)
Sprites: Replicate (retro-diffusion rd-plus and rd-animation models)
Audio: ElevenLabs sound generation API
Leaderboard: AWS Lambda + DynamoDB with daily reset and rate limiting
Pipeline: Commands.com multi-agent orchestration (Claude, GPT, Gemini judge panel)
Hosting: S3 + CloudFront