I Asked an AI to Build Me a Fallout-Themed Tower Defense Game — Here's What Happened
There's a question I keep coming back to: not just can AI build things, but how well does it actually build them? Not a chatbot. Not a content summary. Something with moving parts — logic, physics, animations, game feel. Something that needs to work.
So I gave Claude a single prompt. No spec document. No wireframes. No follow-up clarifications. Just this:
"I would like to create a tower defense game that is run in a browser but could be set up as a mobile app. I would like the game to be a single dynamic level that increases in difficulty and rewards the longer a person plays. I would like a theme for the game to be something similar to Fallout games."
What came back was Wasteland Defense — and honestly, it surprised me.
You can try it here Wasteland Defense
What Got Built
In a single pass, Claude produced a fully playable browser-based tower defense game. No libraries. No frameworks. Just a single self-contained HTML file you can open anywhere. Here's what's inside:
Five tower types, each with a distinct role:
- 🔫 Auto-Turret (50 caps) — your bread-and-butter rapid-fire option, available from wave one
- 🎯 Plasma Rifle (80 caps) — long-range sniper with punishing single-target damage
- 🔥 Flamethrower (100 caps) — short range, but applies a burn-over-time effect that keeps dealing damage after the shot
- 🚀 Missile Launcher (150 caps, unlocks wave 5) — area-of-effect explosions that can wipe tight clusters
- ⚡ Tesla Coil (200 caps, unlocks wave 10) — chains lightning across up to three enemies simultaneously
Seven enemy types pulled straight from the Fallout universe — Raiders, Ghouls, Super Mutants, Eyebots, Assaultrons, Deathclaws, and a Behemoth boss that shows up every tenth wave with thousands of HP and an entirely different energy to the fight.
A real difficulty curve. Enemy HP, movement speed, and spawn count all scale with exponential math as waves progress. The Behemoth boss waves hit differently than the regular ones — and caps rewards scale alongside the threat so you're never stuck without options, you're just stuck making hard choices about which options to take.
Tower upgrades. Click any placed tower and you can pump three separate stats — damage, fire rate, or range — up to five levels each. Sell it back for half cost if you need to reshape your strategy mid-run.
The whole thing runs at 1x, 2x, or 3x speed. It handles touch events. The viewport meta tag is already set for mobile. It is, as claimed, one HTML file.
The Fallout Aesthetic Goes Deeper Than Skins
This is the part that genuinely caught my attention. The game doesn't just slap a nuclear symbol on a generic tower defense template. The aesthetic is woven through every layer of the UI:
The color palette is phosphor-green on near-black — classic Pip-Boy terminal output. The font is Share Tech Mono, which has that chunky retro-computer weight that makes the whole interface feel like it's running on 2077 hardware. The currency is caps, not gold. Not coins. Caps. Enemy names are Raider, Ghoul, Deathclaw — not "enemy type A." The game calls you Overseer. The end screen reads VAULT BREACHED.
These are small things. But they add up into something that has a point of view, which is rarer than it should be.
What This Actually Demonstrates
I've been writing about AI for a while now, and the thing that strikes me here isn't the technical achievement — it's the compression. What Claude did in one response would have taken a solo developer several days of focused work. Not because the code is magical, but because it made hundreds of small decisions without being asked:
- How the path is defined (percentage-based waypoints that scale to any viewport)
- How to implement burn damage as a damage-over-time timer separate from the projectile system
- How to handle AoE explosion radius with damage falloff
- How Tesla chain lightning should visually communicate through particle bursts along the beam path
- When to unlock towers to create a sense of mid-game progression
- How to balance the sell value formula so it rewards smart decisions without being exploitable
None of that was specified. It was inferred from "something similar to Fallout games" and "increases in difficulty."
The Interesting Limitation
Here's the honest part: the game is complete, but it's not polished. If you play it for twenty minutes, you'll notice the pathfinding is fixed — enemies follow a single predetermined route. There's no branching. There's no adaptive AI. The difficulty scaling is math, not design — it gets harder because the numbers get bigger, not because the game introduces new mechanical challenges or forces you to rethink your layout.
A human game designer would eventually add things like:
- Multiple path routes that enemies switch between based on your tower placement
- Special enemy abilities (shields, healing auras, tunneling)
- Terrain that changes as waves progress
- A tech tree that creates meaningful build diversity
The AI built the infrastructure for a tower defense game. The design depth of a great tower defense game — the part that keeps you thinking about it for days — that still requires human intent.
But here's the thing: that infrastructure is genuinely solid. The code is readable, organized, and extensible. If you wanted to add those features, you'd have a clean foundation to build on. And you could ask Claude to help you build them, one piece at a time.
Try It Yourself
The game is a single .html file — no install, no account, no server required. Open it in any browser and you're playing. If you want to run it as a mobile app, wrap it in Capacitor or Cordova — the touch handling is already built in.
Want to add a feature? Change the Fallout theme to something else entirely? The code is all in one place, readable from top to bottom, heavily commented. Remix it.
The Bigger Point
We're at a moment where the gap between "I have an idea" and "I have a working thing" has collapsed in ways that are genuinely hard to internalize. The bottleneck used to be implementation — knowing how to write a canvas-based game loop, how to handle requestAnimationFrame, how to structure entity systems. That bottleneck is largely gone now.
The new bottleneck is taste. Knowing what to ask for. Knowing what good feels like. Knowing which of the hundred small decisions the AI made were right and which ones you'd push back on.
That's a skill worth developing. And the best way to develop it is to start building things and see what comes out.
The wasteland is waiting.
Built with Claude on claude.ai. Single-file HTML, no dependencies, mobile-ready.
— Think Like a Bot
