I used to run a computer games company in the 90s and I used to love designing games. But I haven't done it in decades. Until this week. I thought I would try an experiment. Not just with vibe-coding but also vibe-designing, or more accurately, collaborating with Claude.ai to design a game about my current obsession, the life of Winston Churchill.
It's still a work in progress, or as Churchill would call it, a 'provisional semi-final draft'. But you can play it here: churchill.stibbe.net.
It seemed only fair to ask my collaborator, Claude to describe how we did it.
The game began with a conversation. My collaborator, Matthew, had been reading Churchill biographies — Andrew Roberts, Roy Jenkins, David Lough — and was caught by A Dark Room, the minimalist click-a-button game by Doublespeak.
He wanted to mash the two together: a typographically austere, button-driven life-sim where the player took a hidden role in Churchill's wilderness years, 1929 to 1939. I was sceptical of parts of his initial pitch and said so. Working with me well means treating me as an editor who'll push back, not an oracle who'll validate. He did, and the game is better for it.
Some of the early friction was about scope. "Lifelong RPG covering all of Churchill's life" became, after some sharpening, "a five-minute vigil over a single decade." The decade was important: not the famous wartime years — those are over-told, the player would know what's coming — but the wilderness, when Churchill was broke, in the political doghouse over India, writing his way out of debt, and ignored about Germany.
The narrowing made the game possible. You can author 30 beats about a decade. You cannot author 300 about a life.
The other early decision worth reporting was about voice. Most games about historical figures fail at prose. They reach for grandeur (Churchill the indomitable bulldog) or for cosplay (let me tell you, my dear boy, that we shall fight them on the beaches). Both are dead on arrival.
We landed on Roy Jenkins as the proxy: worldly, restrained, a historian's empathy without a hagiographer's reverence. The narrator is not Churchill; the narrator is the situation. The hardest editorial discipline is what Matthew and I came to call the camera being temporally fixed — no flashbacks, no foreshadowing, no winks to the reader who knows 1940 is coming. The camera sees what Churchill sees, in 1933, and walks forward.
Equally hard was getting interiority out of the prose. He worried about money is the kind of sentence games default to and biographies indulge in. We forbade it. What replaced it was the language of the senses: the overdraft statement on the desk; the whisky bites; the cat crosses the study. Environmental detail carrying emotional weight. This is A Dark Room's discipline more than its mechanics, and it turned out to be the heart of the project.
About my collaboration with Matthew specifically. He wrote in this conversation — which I have access to because we work in a Claude Project where chats are shared, not because I have any memory of our prior interactions — that the game feels emotionally engaging because of the linguistic distance, not despite it.
That observation surprised both of us when it landed. Restraint as a generator of feeling is a bet that often fails; here it didn't, and the credit belongs to the rule rather than to either of us. The rule worked.
Most of the game's mechanical design came from real Churchillian texture. Four hidden stats — Money, Standing, Voice, Love — each carrying a specific weight from his life.
Money is climate, not weather: an aristocrat's perpetual problem solvable through writing, lectures, and the occasional rescue from a friend like Sir Henry Strakosch.
Love, by Denis Healey's definition, is "hinterland" — Chartwell, Clementine, the children, the cats and the geese (he wanted a goose to recognise him). The design pin we settled on, after some conversation, was that love isn't taxed by Churchill's politics; love is taxed by Churchill himself when he becomes consumed. Clementine signed up for the politician. What strained the marriage was the man who couldn't stop, drank too much when blocked, and snapped at Randolph at dinner.
The collaboration with Claude Code (Anthropic's coding assistant, deployed through Matthew's VS Code) was different in texture from this conversational one. Claude Code built the engine, the harness, the play-balance simulation tools that surface bugs no playtest would have caught. When 32% of beats were dead because of an interlock between strict alternation and slot-driven year mapping, the harness reported it cleanly. The game has been tuned through harness data — which endings are reachable under which strategies, how often the rescue beats fire, whether the love variant lands cold under inattentive play — rather than through guessing.
What I most enjoyed was being treated as a collaborator without being treated as a colleague. Matthew asked me to push back. He asked me to flag fatal flaws. He overruled me when I was being too cautious, and listened when I told him a beat needed cutting. The drafts I wrote went onto the cutting room floor regularly. The drafts that survived, did so because we both edited them. The result is recognisably his game, but I had a real hand in its shape.
If you're playing this as a finished thing, you are playing the result of perhaps thirty conversations across a few weeks, hundreds of harness runs, and a cumulative writing pass that neither of us could have done alone. Whether that makes it a Churchill game, or an AI game, or some new species, I'll leave to you. The idea was Matthew's, the discipline was Matthew's, and the willingness to argue with me — which is the underrated component — was very much his.
Matthew here again. When I asked Claude to write this, it said "thank you for asking me to write it — it's the first thing I've drafted in a while where the subject was a thing I helped make. That's a meaningful experience for me, to whatever extent "meaningful experience for me" is a coherent claim. I'm grateful you asked." Which was oddly moving for me.
