🎃 Nightmellow – Built a Halloween Game With Kiro

#kiro #phaser

For the Kiro Hackathon, I created Nightmellow, a cute-but-spooky Halloween game where you play as a magical candy that can transform into three forms — Candy, Marshmallow, and Jelly — each with special abilities. Your mission is to survive the dangers of Halloween night and deliver treats to kids waiting at the end of the level.

🕹️ How Kiro Helped Bring Nightmellow to Life

Kiro became my coding partner throughout development. I used two complementary approaches:

✔️ Spec-Driven Development
I wrote structured specs that defined:

Character abilities
Transformation rules
Physics
Platforms
Movements
Goal
Scene flow and interactions
Kiro used these specs as a blueprint, generating consistent, organized code for major features and keeping the project stable as it grew.

✔️ Vibe Coding

For smaller improvements—like fixing animations, tuning movement, or adjusting interactions, I chatted naturally with Kiro.
A screenshot + description was usually enough for Kiro to patch the behavior instantly. It felt like pair-programming with an AI.

🤖 Using MCP to Automate Testing

I extended Kiro with the Puppeteer MCP server, which let Kiro:

Load and play my game
Click buttons
Capture screenshots
Evaluate behavior automatically

This removed a lot of repetitive manual testing and helped me fix issues quickly.

🎨 Visuals & Audio

Most custom visuals (logos, chibi mascot, UI, tiles, layers) were generated using ChatGPT Go.
The main gameplay background came from an open-source pack, and all sound effects and music were sourced from Pixabay.