PromptBrawl

PromptBrawl is an AI-powered fighting game built over a weekend hackathon. You describe any character you can imagine — or pick from the Nickelodeon classics you grew up watching — and they come to life and fight. The design direction was cyberpunk meets nostalgic cartoon, and the whole thing was built, designed, and shipped in 48 hours.

Solo designer and engineer. I owned the full stack — UI design in Figma, frontend implementation, and API integration across multiple services. This was a build-fast-and-figure-it-out project, which meant every decision had to be made quickly and work immediately.

The core challenge was making AI-generated characters feel alive and fight-worthy on screen. A character name goes in and something interesting has to come out — with personality, with lore, with a visual identity. That pipeline needed to work reliably under hackathon conditions with APIs that had credit limits and no guarantee of uptime.

The character generation pipeline works in layers. Claude researches the character — who they are, what universe they're from, what their abilities and personality look like. That lore then feeds into an image generation API to create the character illustration. If the image credits run out, there's a fallback — a Claude-generated stickman that can still move, jump, and fight. Not polished, but it works.

For multiplayer I used Ably — free, real-time room creation so two players on the same network can fight each other. Commentary during battles is voiced by ElevenLabs, which makes the whole thing feel like a proper game broadcast.

The design was intentionally wacky — a cyberpunk arena aesthetic with enough nostalgia to make you want to pit Henry Danger against Sandy Cheeks from SpongeBob and see what happens.

A working multiplayer AI fighting game built in a weekend. Pick a character, fight an AI opponent or a friend in the same room, and watch Claude figure out who would win. The fallback systems meant it kept working even when APIs hit their limits — which is the only thing that matters when you're demoing at a hackathon.