Andrew Brown

Jolly's Challenge is a browser-based remake of the 1989 puzzle game Chip's Challenge, built on a deterministic tile-based game engine written from scratch. The player guides Jolly through grid-based rooms, collecting orbs to open the gate to each room's exit while dealing with coloured keys and locks, hazards, enemies, and timing puzzles. Instead of a small set of hand-made levels, the project implements 73 features as individual game mechanics — ice and conveyor tiles, teleporters, floor and timer switches, patrolling and chasing enemies, pushable blocks, dark rooms lit only around the player, and dozens more — each built as a self-contained, removable engine "pack" and paired with its own purpose-built test level (83 levels in total), so every mechanic can be played and verified in isolation before it is combined with others. The engine core is fully deterministic and records every play session, which means a feature can be tested by replaying recorded inputs and comparing the resulting game state, and any session can be forked and replayed for debugging. All of the game's art is AI-generated 512×512 tile artwork produced through a custom asset-design tool built for this project, and development itself was managed through a second custom tool, a project-manager board that broke the game into features and tasks, each shipped with screenshots and recorded playtests for human review before merging. The game is intentionally presented as a playable mechanics playground rather than a polished, finished title: the test levels all run in the browser today, and they demonstrate both the breadth of the mechanic set and the feature-driven, agent-built workflow used to produce it under a self-imposed $150 budget using only Meta models.