CLUU is a clockwork adventure where every mechanic doubles as a real Claude Code lesson. Lamps are commit checkpoints, wardens ask real prompting questions before you can pass, and the Keeper's gramophones speak actual guidance as you explore.
A small clay-and-brass automaton called Cluu blinks awake on a dusty workbench: the last machine still running. Ten wardens hold the works. Learn the Keeper's words. Relight them all.
A full run crosses five distinct painted biomes across ten levels, each ending in a dramatized boss duel with its own destruction cinematic.
Relighting a lamp is framed exactly like making a commit: a deliberate, named checkpoint you can return to, not just a light switching on.
Ten wardens gate progress with genuine prompting and Claude Code questions. Getting past one means actually understanding the practice, not memorizing a quip.
Voiced monologues at gramophones scattered through the world, each one grounded in a real Claude Code practice, commits as checkpoints, /help, and more.
Cog armor and rare brass moths reward players who go looking, layered behind secondary planes, pits and crawl-spaces set behind the main walk-line.
The long-term goal is bigger than the puppet world: a strong prompt a player writes inside an encounter should become something they can carry into Cursor, Claude Code, or Cowork, not something that stays locked inside the game.
The grading pipeline for that already exists: encounter contracts authored as .logic.md files, graded live against NVIDIA NIM (z-ai/glm-5.2) with a local deterministic fallback grader, in lib/encounters and app/api/encounter. Wiring it fully into the world is the next major milestone.
Next.js hosts a self-contained HTML5 canvas game at the root route, with one API route grading player prompts through NVIDIA NIM and falling back to a local deterministic grader when it's unavailable.
| Layer | Technology |
|---|---|
| Application shell | Next.js 16, App Router |
| Game runtime | Self-contained HTML5 canvas game at the root route |
| Grading API | Node API route, grades player prompts against NVIDIA NIM (z-ai/glm-5.2), with a local deterministic fallback |
| Auth and state | None in this repo; Supabase present only as gitignored local CLI state |
Ten levels. Ten real lessons. One clockwork automaton with the lamps to prove it.
Play it now, cluu.vercel.app