Dad wanted something for his Computer Science class. I picked the game, an AI built it, and nobody here has finished it.

My Dad has just started teaching Computer Science. He’s also really excited about AI, forever trying new models and finding new uses. Part of the reason he’s been able to become a teacher at all is that he used AI to make his company more efficient, so he could run it in fewer days.

Yesterday evening he was working out how to build a lesson around it. Something that would show a class what AI can do, exciting the pupils in his class about the topic by getting them involving in creating something during the lesson.

He’s been using Kimi a lot. He likes that it builds websites as its output and publishes them on its own servers, so you can share what it made straight away. The plan was a prompt he could use in class: describe the idea, collect the class’s input, have Kimi build the game, and have everyone play it all within one period.

He asked me to get involved. He wanted me to act as the class, deciding the type of game and then testing what came out.

I thought it would be better than Pong. I was expecting something like Snake. Short on colour, a bit pixely, a mouse made of squares.

Four games to choose from

Dad had been talking to one Kimi chat to work out what he wanted, getting it to write a prompt he could paste into a fresh, empty chat at the start of the lesson. He’d done that, and handed me the phone to use as if I were the class.

The prompt had nine blanks in it for the class to fill in.

It didn’t work out as he expected. The fresh chat didn’t realise the answers were coming later. It decided it was supposed to fill the blanks itself, but then give us a few options to choose from, so the first thing it did was come back with four game outlines.

Dad watched that happen and reckoned it was a better way to run it anyway. Getting twenty-odd people to agree on nine separate questions, quickly, and still end up with answers consistent enough to make a game that makes sense, would be hard. Picking one of four is more realistic.

So that’s where my job started. Pick one of these.

I took Biscuit Bandit. The homework one was too much like school, and the kitchen game sounded better than a grubby space station.

What turned up

A moonlit kitchen with the light coming off the tiles. A chubby mouse in a black eye mask and a red-and-white striped shirt with a swag sack over his shoulder. Crumbs bursting when you grab a biscuit, and pizzicato heist music underneath it. The title screen says One mouse. One kitchen. A tin full of biscuits.

Kimi wrote the game, drew it, created the backing music, put it on a web page of its own and handed us the link.

Playing it

Arrows to move, space to dash. You go round the kitchen floor collecting biscuits while mousetraps snap and rolling pins sweep the tiles, faster every wave. Hit a trap and you lose a heart and drop half of what you’re carrying. From wave three the cat wakes up, and once it’s awake you can’t wait anywhere, so you keep moving, and that takes you into the parts of the floor where the traps and the pins are.

Every biscuit makes you rounder and slower and worth more points. Kimi called it the Waddle Rule and pitched it as greed against speed. There’s no greed in it, because you have to clear every biscuit on the floor to finish a wave. You don’t choose. You just get slower.

Biscuits sometimes land on top of a mousetrap. You go for the biscuit, you get the biscuit, you lose a life.

Nobody here has finished it

Clear five waves and the Golden Bourbon appears, worth 500, and stealing it wins. I’ve not got that far. I didn’t get past wave four and I lost a lot of lives. My best is about 2,000.

Dad’s got furthest, into the late stages of wave five, where the Waddle Rule catches him. By then you’ve eaten so much you can’t get away from the cat.

Play it on a keyboard

The first version didn’t work on a phone. That made sense. We’d asked for something for a classroom, with desktops and keyboards. We noticed, asked Kimi to fix it, and it did in a couple of minutes.

It works on a phone now, but you drag a circle that turns you, so you curve round corners instead of cutting them. Use a laptop if you’ve got one.

Have a go!