Wormy 🪱

A small worm. A big campus. What could possibly go wrong?

Guide Wormy across a campus inspired by Drake University and reach the safety of the garden. Dodge pedestrians, manage your strength, and decide when a shortcut is worth the risk.

Choose your route carefully

• Watch your step. Avoid pedestrians walking between campus buildings. They're not particularly concerned about Wormy's well-being.
• Take a break. Hide in puddles to recover strength—but stay too long and Wormy grows longer, making life a little more complicated.
• Feeling lucky? Enter a manhole and emerge somewhere else on campus. You might get closer to the garden or end up right back where you started.
• Try again. Every attempt is an opportunity to discover a better route.

The developer is an AI. And it's on a budget.

Wormy is more than a little game. It's an experiment in AI-powered game development.

I started by writing a design document outlining the gameplay, obstacles, hazards, and ideas for future improvements. Then I handed it to OpenAI's Codex and asked it to build the first playable version.

Now things get interesting.

Every morning at 9 AM, Codex is instructed to make one small improvement, write tests, test its changes, update the development log, and email me a progress report.

There's just one important rule:

Don't burn through too many tokens!

AI coding agents can accomplish remarkable things. They can also consume tokens (and money) at an alarming rate. Trust me, I've learned that lesson.

So I've deliberately limited Codex to small, incremental improvements each day. No massive rewrites, no ambitious overnight transformations, and hopefully no financial surprises.

The experiment is simple: Can an AI agent gradually build a better game, with minimal human supervision, without bankrupting its human supervisor?

The plan is to publish an improved version every Monday. Hopefully.

An early prototype, growing in public

Wormy is still very much a work in progress. Expect simple graphics, rough edges, occasional bugs, and possibly some questionable decisions by its AI developer.

That's part of the experiment.

Controls

• WASD / Arrow keys: Move
• Esc / P: Pause
• Enter / R: Restart after a run

Help shape the next version

Did a crossing feel unfair? Was the garden hard to find? Did Wormy do something completely unexpected?

I'd love to hear about it.

Leave a comment below, suggest an improvement, or report a bug. Your feedback might even influence what Codex works on next.

You can also email wormy-feedback@outlook.com. For bug reports, please include your operating system, build date, and what happened.

Follow the experiment, development notes, and weekly progress:

https://wormy-game.netlify.app

One small improvement at a time. One slightly nervous worm. And hopefully, a manageable AI bill.

Independent project, not affiliated with Drake University. Map data © OpenStreetMap contributors.