You're an accountant that crash landed on an alien planet | Accrualworld

Vibe coding a pixel art web game with Claude Code just for funsies (Lab Session #1)

Instead of doomscrolling on YouTube shorts, I spent all of Memorial Day weekend chatting with Claude to the wee hours of the night.

Everyone in the finance, accounting, and AI space on LinkedIn is talking about building agents to streamline prepaids, journal entries, and workflows. And honestly? I just didn’t want to build that.

How can I have fun with this and build something that's slightly useful? Starting with the actual FASB standards anchored the rules, and the story grew from there. At first, I built a PacMan clone just to get my fingers wet with Claude Code and connecting my GitHub account.

Then I jumped into thinking about a story where you’re an accountant who crash-landed on an alien planet where everything is trying to kill you – even the air. So, in order to survive and gather the resources necessary to fix your ship, you need to answer some puzzles/questions (accounting rules-based).

So, the style of the game borrows heavily from the Game Boy and 8-bit pixel art. I wanted the game to have a nostalgic feel and be fun while you casually learn some accounting concepts. The accounting concepts are based on the inventory and cash rules. I grabbed the actual rules from the FASB site and attached them to the context window so Claude code had the right foundation for the quizzes.

There are wonders and threats that a player can experience during the game. There’s a concept of time. You have to plant the seeds and process the plants into potions and resources you need to survive. You need to survive for at least 10 Sol days in order to fix your ship. Mutations happen since you’re in outer space.

Yes, adding the accounting concepts turns this into a game that can be used as a training module for accountants. I had the most fun thinking up the base story, how a player earns the resources, whether a player can “win” this game, or whether the game is never-ending, and you’ll never get to go back home.

Obviously, I view this as a playable MVP. If I ever get to push this further in the future, I would love to work with actual artists and game developers to build custom assets and different worlds that a player can travel to. It would be so awesome! But, for now, it’s available to play here: https://accrualworld.pages.dev/

This is the kind of brain I bring to your books, too — just with less alien fog and more cash flow forecasts.

Give it a go and let me know what you think. I’d love to hear if it broke your brain (in the best way).