Remaking Party House | MOND←TECH MAGAZINE
tl;dr: To play the game in the browser, click here. (Doesn’t<br>work on mobile, sound warning, use escape to access options and see controls.)
What started as a cute little project to learn one or two things about game development eventually turned<br>into a (pretty darn close to perfect) replica of an existing game. You can go and give it a try, or read<br>on to hear my thoughts on Godot, Claude, and gamedev.
TICKET TKR and WATCH DOG.
Toggle original/dithered image
Party House is a great game. If you’re not familiar, Party House was released as part of<br>the UFO 50 game collection. (Which is to<br>say, it’s a single game out of fifty.)
Roughly, UFO 50 was a project by Mossmouth (most famously Derek Yu, developer of<br>Spelunky), whose goal it was to release a full 50 games at once. It released in 2024 to widespread critical<br>acclaim, and has a staggering amount of content.
These games vastly vary in scope (some are party games, or can be finished in just a few hours, others are<br>sprawling adventures). Many of them could easily have been released as standalone titles on Steam. Really,<br>it’s a bit absurd just how much “stuff” there is inside of this game, and how silly<br>(non-derogatory) this whole project was.
If you enjoy small indie games at all, I strongly recommend just<br>buying the game, and jumping in. I’d recommend skipping Barbuta (the first game on the list), and going to Mini<br>& Max (my favorite, think of a Mario-ish story-driven platformer in a single connected world, in which<br>your character can shrink and grow in size), Party House, Mooncat (???), Valbrace (first person dungeon<br>crawler) or Night Manor (horror adventure). (Shoutouts to Mortol, and to Avianos for demonstrating that a<br>full 4X strategy game using no more than six buttons is possible.)
So, what’s Party House like? Frankly, you should just<br>play it (again, no mobile support). If you can’t, here’s the<br>quick rundown: Party House is (essentially) a roguelite deckbuilder.
You alternate between a “planning” stage, during which you “purchase” new guests<br>for your party…
The shop.
Toggle original/dithered image
…and a “party” stage, during which you pull random guests from your rolodex, and use<br>guest abilities to increase round scores and manage trouble:
The party.
Toggle original/dithered image
You win by getting four Star Guests to attend your party at the same time, and lose once the time runs<br>out. Also, the music bops. That’s it!
Remaking Party House
What was my motivation here? Really, I’d never done a lot of game development. I just wanted to<br>figure out how it “feels” compared to, y’know, other types of coding. That’s it. I<br>always found the weird disconnect between the GUI and the code, and the whole runtime thing weirdly<br>confusing.
(That’s still true, by the way.)
Overall, re-making a game was fun, and significantly easier than building one from scratch.
The original prototype was built with my bare hands, but as it became more and more clear that video games<br>are ~90% polishing everything to “feel good” and wiring up all the little flourishes and<br>assets, I eventually stopped working on it (life was busy), and then when I returned to it I reached for<br>Claude.
(At this point ‘Party House’ had been sitting on my harddrive, untouched, for several months,<br>so I don’t view this as a failure, moral or otherwise.)
I like to cope that I wrote ~80% of the code, and then handed things over to Claude, who wrote<br>the remaining ~80%. I (very quickly) stopped looking at the code, other than for educational purposes. The reason why this<br>worked was that the external game (and the spec Claude and I assembled) worked as a source of truth that<br>kept things from falling apart. The project was small enough that we managed to push it over the finishing<br>line before context management became untenable.
(Also, just for the record, none of the writing on my blog is AI generated. It’s all artisanally<br>hand-crafted sentences, written with my own bare paws, etc.)
One final note: The current version of the remake is built with assets stripped from the original. If I<br>thought there were any risk that this would hurt UFO 50 sales, I’d not release it as is. I worked<br>myself into a bit of a corner: When making a ‘faithful’ remake you’re essentially locked<br>into using the original assets, and stripping them out in favor of something else on the finishing line<br>also doesn’t feel right. For now I’m putting it online as is, and hope that this falls under<br>fair use. (Again, if you enjoy this remake at all, you should buy UFO 50.)
Takeaways on Claude
Just look at this lil fella. It almost looks like a UFO 50 character.
Toggle original/dithered image
When I reached for Claude, a very rudimentary version of the game already existed....