Grounds for War

🥤 GROUNDS FOR WAR ☕

Plants vs. Zombies meets the beverage aisle. The Coffee Empire is marching on the Cola Springs, and every last demitasse of them arrives angry. Pop sugar bubbles, deploy carbonated defenders, and serve the morning rush its final order.

10-level campaign · 2 bosses · 11 units · Endless mode · ~25 minutes · dangerously caffeinated

How to play

• 🫧 Click rising bubbles to collect sugar (cola fizzes UP — our sun falls the wrong way on purpose)
• 🥫 Place cola units in lanes: click a card, click a tile (1–7 hotkeys, Straw = refund tool)
• 🚀 Each lane has ONE emergency Bottle Rocket. Spend it wisely.
• 🖱️ Some things want clicking mid-fight: vent Soda Fountains early, pop boss foam-blobs to free trapped units.

☕🥤 How we brewed the themes

COLA isn't a skin here — it's the physics. The resource is sugar carried by rising carbonation bubbles. The faction's weapons are stored CO₂: a Soda Fountain that builds visible pressure you can vent early, Shaken Can landmines, and the Mintos geyser nuke you've seen on the internet. Ice-cold control (Cooler, Cola Float) is the cola side's whole battle plan.

COFFEE isn't a skin either — it's the enemy AI. Any coffee enemy that drops below half HP hits Caffeine Kick-In: faster, jitterier, angrier. Once per level the clock strikes 3:00 PM and the whole invasion crashes — 8 seconds of drowsy, half-speed coffee, your window to strike. There's decaf as a weapon (strips the rush permanently), bean scouts that ROAST into tougher units if you don't kill them green, latte-art mages, slow-immune Cold Brew, and a final boss who is, of course, The Barista. TODD has your order. It's a war crime with oat milk.

🤖 AI direction & pipeline

This entry is an experiment in maximum-delegation AI development:

• Design: two parallel AI planning passes (a game-design doc with full stat tables, and a technical architecture doc) reconciled into one build plan before any code.
• Code: 100% written by Claude Code — ~20 vanilla-JS modules, no engine, no build step.
• Art: zero image files. All 25+ characters are vector painter functions the AI wrote (canvas paths), pre-rendered to sprites at runtime. The cover image was rendered by the game itself.
• Audio: zero audio files. Every SFX is a declarative synth spec; the 3-track chiptune soundtrack is a pattern sequencer using the WebAudio lookahead-scheduler.
• The interesting part — verification: the AI played its own game. A debug harness exposes state snapshots, scripted clicks, and an autoplay bot; the model tuned the campaign by running seeded simulations and reading structured console telemetry, then adjusted the data tables. Open the dev console and try game.simulate(3) yourself.

Controls

Mouse (everything) · 1–7 select cards · P / Esc pause · M mute · 2× speed in settings

---

Made solo-with-AI in 72h for the Ultimate AI-Powered Game Jam #1. #AIGameJam