A caveman jungle-foraging game I built solo for the Parsewave Game Jam 2026.
You're a caveman who leaves his riverside cave to gather fruit and flowers for his family before nightfall. You throw stones catapult-style to knock food down, birds and dinosaurs try to steal whatever you've collected, and wind gusts mess with your aim as you get deeper into the jungle.
Play the final game: https://jovial-kringle-2ae1b7.netlify.app Source code: https://github.com/Tenali-Rama/stone-n-spear AI traces repo: https://github.com/Tenali-Rama/parsewave-game-jam
There's also an earlier build I deployed mid-jam while I was still iterating on the mechanics, before the final polish pass: https://stately-croissant-8d9263.netlify.app/ — keeping it here for the record since it shows the in-progress state, but the Netlify link above is the actual submission.
Click/tap and drag back from the caveman to aim, like pulling back a slingshot — the further you pull, the harder the throw. You can also hold SPACE to charge a fixed-angle throw instead. Walk into fruit and flowers to auto-collect them, or knock them down with a thrown stone.
You start with 6 stones and every throw costs one, so you need to keep picking more up off the ground as you go. Top-left shows what your family is asking for that round (a mix of ripe fruit, unripe fruit, and flowers, each worth different points) — get it done before the sun-timer runs out.
Birds and (from level 2 onward) dinosaurs will swoop in and steal stuff right out of your hands if you let them get close. Wind picks up the deeper you get and will bend your throws off course. There's a map button in the corner if you want to see how far along you are.
Works with mouse, trackpad, touch, or keyboard. Built desktop-first but it holds up fine on mobile.
Honest version: I didn't start with this idea. I spent the first several hours of the jam building a completely different game — a ring-toss/tower game called "Ring Lord" using Matter.js for the physics. I got a working prototype, iterated on the throw mechanic, generated a bunch of custom art for it, and even had chapter/level structure going. But the physics never felt right — rings kept failing to land properly no matter how much I tuned it, and it just wasn't fun. About 19-20 hours in, with the clock getting uncomfortably close, I scrapped it and started over with Stone & Spear instead.
Everything from that point was built fresh: the intro cinematic, the catapult throw mechanic, the carry-capacity and family-request system, the timer, and the core loop. Once that was working I layered on the stuff that makes it feel like an actual game rather than a tech demo — levels that get progressively harder, a dinosaur enemy on top of the birds, wind gusts that deflect your throws, the stone-scarcity mechanic so you can't just spam-throw forever, a villager who pops up with little messages while you play, and the map screen.
The abandoned ring-toss game isn't part of this submission — none of its code or assets made it into Stone & Spear. I'm including those chats in the AI traces anyway since they're part of how the night actually went, and I'd rather be upfront about the pivot than pretend I had this idea from hour zero.
- Claude — did basically all of the actual game logic, HTML/CSS/JS, debugging, and design decisions with me throughout the night, plus wrote all the prompts I used for image/audio generation.
- ChatGPT for image generation — all the sprites and backgrounds (caveman animations, fruit/flower/stone icons, jungle scenes, the intro story panels) came from here. One annoying thing: it can't actually output transparent PNGs, so I had every sprite generated on a flat magenta background and stripped that out in code instead.
- Gemini (Lyria 3) for the two background music tracks (ambient + a more tense one that kicks in as things get harder).
- All the sound effects — throws, hits, bird/dino noises, win/lose sounds — are generated on the fly with the Web Audio API rather than AI-generated audio files. Gemini's music tool isn't really built for short one-shot SFX, and I didn't want to burn time gambling on that working, so I just had Claude write oscillator-based synth code for it instead.
A couple of chats in the traces folder are marked prior_ and happened before the build window even opened (registration closed 10 Jul 10PM IST, build started right after) — one was me poking around running open-source models on Colab, the other was an early, completely separate ring-toss prototype from before the jam. Neither of those ended up in this game at all.
The in-window Ring Lord tower game (the one I abandoned, mentioned above) is also in the traces for transparency, but again, none of it is in the final submission.
No templates, starter kits, or game engines — it's plain HTML5 Canvas and JavaScript, no dependencies. All art and audio assets were generated specifically for this project.
index.html — the whole game, markup/styles/logic all in one file
assets/images/ — sprites and backgrounds
assets/audio/ — the two music tracks
Full export of my Claude chat history for the whole build is in the AI traces repo linked above, including the abandoned ring-toss stuff, so you can see the whole process warts and all.