Alien Pinball Postmortem: Full Physics Pinball Game Built with Claude + AI Toolchain

A developer (u/Slackluster) posted a detailed postmortem on r/ClaudeAI about building Alien Pinball — a fully physics-driven browser pinball game — using Claude Code Max (Opus model), ChatGPT image gen, Suno music, and the LittleJS engine with Box2D WASM. The game features multiball, rollover multiplier, skill shots, combos, outlane gutter saves, and a wizard-mode centipede boss. Playable at itch.io/focaccai.

Key Workflow Details

• Code: Claude Code Max (Opus) for all game logic, custom Box2D parts (slingshots, drop targets, spinners, ramps, ball locks, break targets), and a full in-game table editor for drag/place/tuning.
• Art: ChatGPT image gen with prompts written by Claude — used a silhouette of collision geometry (walls, ramps, bumpers) as prompt input so the art matches physics exactly. Took multiple generations plus manual compositing.
• Music: Suno 5.5 — three tracks, prompts written by Claude.
• Sounds: ZzFX — all sounds generated procedurally at game start, no audio files. Claude tuned parameters iteratively.
• Engine: LittleJS + Box2D WASM. Small, fast, AI-friendly due to minimal API surface.
• Input: ~50% speech-to-text, rest manual typing + code editing.

Design Insights

• The bumpers being giant eyeballs came from an AI image generation — the developer ran with it.
• Claude acted as a pinball domain consultant: asked it questions like "what does a complete pinball table have?" and "how should wizard mode work?" to fill genre conventions.
• AI debug player auto-flips and knocks the ball around — useful for observation/ideation.
• Alien centipede boss worked first try: multi-segmented, loses tail segments on hit, speeds up and turns red.

Human-Only Parts

• Feel: Restitution values, flipper torque, ramp curvature, slingshot kick angles, peg bounce. Git log had many commits like "tweak peg bounce" and "1.49 → 1.491".
• Polish tail: Last week was sound passes, ramp angles, message priorities, and a multiball end-check race condition. All small, none optional.

The developer reports the experience felt like co-development rather than code generation — describing what they want, riffing with Claude, then diving in by hand to steer or clean up.