Mochi's Garden
A cozy cat platformer my youngest dreamed up and built with Claude
What it is
Mochi’s Garden is a cozy little platformer my youngest made — the idea, the story, the cat, and the feel of it are all theirs; they built it by describing what they wanted to Claude and shaping it from there. You play as Mochi, a cat drifting through a dream made of six small worlds: The Garden, The Rooftops, The Treetops, The Snowy Cottage, Above the Clouds, and The Starlit Dream. In each one you gather every ball of yarn and make your way to a cozy basket at the end. When the last world is crossed, Mochi curls into the basket and the dream wraps soft around her. Naptime.
It’s deliberately gentle: arrow keys to move, space to jump, with a double-jump so nothing feels out of reach — and falling is harmless, there’s no way to lose. Just a soft, warm world to wander through.
How it’s built
The whole game is a single self-contained HTML file — no framework, no
libraries, no build step. The world is drawn on an HTML5 <canvas> with
plain JavaScript, and the menus, HUD, and the cream-and-rose storybook look
are styled with CSS (Google’s Fraunces and Nunito fonts). That’s the
entire stack, which is part of what makes it nice: it’s small enough to read
top to bottom and runs anywhere a browser does.
Under the hood it’s a classic game loop: every frame reads the keyboard, nudges Mochi by gravity and momentum, checks her against the platforms and the yarn, and redraws the scene. Each of the six worlds is just a little list of platforms, yarn, and a basket — so adding a new world is mostly describing a new layout.
Why it’s here
This launcher is a showcase of things our family builds, and that includes the kids. Mochi’s Garden is the first of theirs — made for the joy of making it, and polished enough to actually sit and play. More to come as they build them.