Resume Rush

Job seekers send resumes into the void and hear nothing back. Resume Rush flips that into a game. You ride through the city on a skateboard, tossing resumes at every business that's hiring while dodging the things in your way: Cybertrucks, Karens, tech bros, angry grandmas. An arcade runner in the spirit of Paperboy, built around the one thing ZipRecruiter is about: getting seen by the people who are hiring.

Built solo over a weekend in Claude Code. Every asset is generated: the characters and storefronts in ChatGPT Images, all the sound, voice, and music in ElevenLabs. The whole thing was built from scratch rather than in a ready-made game tool, which is what gives it that old-school arcade look. A live global leaderboard lets anyone who plays fight for the top spot.

Role: Concept, game design, art direction, AI asset generation, audio direction, Claude Code development, deployment.

Tools: Claude Code, Next.js, HTML5 Canvas, Tailwind, ChatGPT Images, ElevenLabs, Vercel, Upstash.

I built it playable before any art existed, just blocks on a road, tuned until the dodging and the speed felt right. The look only went on once it already played. If it wasn't fun as plain blocks, no art was going to save it.

Every character was generated as a detailed render. Those live full-size on the title and game-over screens, where there's time to actually look at them. At gameplay size and speed the detail doesn't hold, so the in-game version of each one is stripped down to a clear shape you can read in a glance.

The storefronts were the hard part. The first attempt chased real 3D buildings, and they came out wrong: walls facing the wrong way, bleeding into the street, slow on a phone. I could see it was fighting the look I wanted, so I scrapped it and pushed it toward flat storefronts that recede down the street, the way Paperboy and OutRun fake their depth. Less impressive under the hood, but it's what holds up at speed. The genre-correct look beat the clever one.

The signs and the cast are the satire layer, the GTA instinct of making the city itself the joke, dropped on top of the Paperboy toss and the arcade engine. I chose that voice deliberately, not by accident: BEAN THERE, SOLE FOOD, POUR DECISIONS, SEW WHAT. And the puns earn their place in the rules. Only the green WE'RE HIRING shops are targets, so every block is a real read, aim at who's hiring and skip the decoys, instead of mindless tossing. An earlier FIRING and WIRING wordplay obstacle got cut; the shop names carry the joke on their own.

The audio is generated too, all ElevenLabs. The first pass was too much, everything playing at once until it read as noise. I wanted personality without the constant racket, so the sounds got dialed back to fire now and then instead of every time, the music sits quiet under the action, and the character voices ride a notch above. Personality without becoming constant.

The real result isn't the game, it's the proof: one designer can concept, art-direct, and ship a finished, playable product end to end through Claude Code. For now it has only gone to the team, where the response was strong enough that a wider release is on the table.