From Prompt to Playable: Building a Phaser Survival Game with Codex and SpriteShip

There is a big difference between a game prototype that technically works and one that feels like a game. Movement, spawning, upgrades, and collision can be built with colored rectangles. That is often the right way to start. But the moment you want an animated player, a family of enemies, weapon variety, collectibles, and a consistent visual identity, the art pipeline can become the project. For a recent experiment, I wanted to see how far I could get by combining three tools: Phaser 3 for the game runtime Codex for implementation and iteration SpriteShip for game-ready visual assets through its MCP/API workflow The result was Last Light , a top-down survival game that runs in desktop and mobile browsers. It has an animated player, multiple enemy families, a large humanoid with separate walk and attack animations, sixteen weapons, sixteen collectibles, upgrades, an objective, and a boss encounter. Play Last Light: https://spriteship.github.io/sample_games/last-light/ Browse the source repository: https://github.com/spriteship/sample_games More importantly, it became playable through a surprisingly natural loop: describe an asset, generate it in SpriteShip, inspect or revise it, and let Codex wire the exported data into Phaser. Starting with gameplay, not presentation The first version was intentionally plain. It established the systems that mattered: Top-down movement Automatic targeting and firing Enemy spawning and difficulty progression Experience drops and upgrades Desktop and touch input A camera following the player across a large map That gave us something useful to evaluate. Once the loop was playable, every art decision could be judged in motion rather than in isolation. This order mattered. SpriteShip did not have to invent the game design; it could supply assets for systems that already existed. Creating a coherent project in SpriteShip Instead of making unrelated images one at a time, we created a top-down overhead project in SpriteShip. That project co