The challenge

A small host competes with the big booking platforms for attention. Ulbinghof wanted guests to remember the house, get a feel for its humour and hospitality, and still reach a booking request in a few clicks.

The approach

No specification, no sprint plan. The owner described what he wanted in plain language, Claude built it, he played it and answered in a sentence or two. Every decision on this page comes from that back-and-forth.

The result

Two days from the first message to a playable, bookable game on our own server: 20 locations, nine verbs, talking cats, a ghost in the cellar – and a booking flow that ends in a ready-to-send request with apartment, dates, guests and total price.

1 · It started with one message

The brief was a single chat message: the story of a mutated farm creature, a list of rooms and characters, three screenshots of a 1980s adventure classic as a style reference and a link to the farm’s listing. The first playable version followed the real house and showed 45 real photos next to the pixels.

2 · Tested before anyone played

An automated playthrough finishes the game from intro to ending after every change, and a second test fires more than 20,000 random commands at it. An independent review still found a blocker: two-object commands could not be completed with the mouse. It was fixed before the owner saw it.

3 · Feedback in one sentence

“I’m stuck in Oma G’s kitchen.” A dialog option was cut off on his screen; the fix was checked on four screen sizes. Then: “Looks good – refine it, higher resolution, but keep the pixel look.” Every scene and character was redrawn at double resolution.

4 · Booking becomes part of the world

The owner sketched the idea: Oma G, a reservation book in the hallway and a key board with five keys. The rule we agreed on: booking may feel like part of the game, but it is never a puzzle. One button opens the same reservation book from anywhere, and the humour stops at the price summary.

5 · A privacy catch along the way

Live availability comes from the apartments’ calendar feeds. Those feeds also carry reservation codes and partial phone numbers, so they must not end up in a public page. A small script on the server now passes on occupied dates and nothing else.

6 · Shipped as one page

The finished game is a single HTML page of about 5,000 lines of code. Every scene, character and icon is drawn in code, the fonts are self-hosted and nothing needs installing. The images and text of this project page were made in the same conversation.