We played several game ideas through with COOP and finally built this one: the oldest playground game in the world, restaged as a Christmas-aisle heist. Youre the can. Mom and Dad are the obstacle. The goal is to get home and get into the cart without being caught. Users tap to slide forward while the parents are distracted talking. Then freeze the moment the parents turn. We slowly make our way up the isle as we dont want to get caught. One minute per round. Long enough to stick around and to keep playing but also short enough win and secure the COOP voucher.

We leaned on AI to run iteration after iteration in 3D for us. We used it to generate prototypes to find the right tonality: We defined the mood, the palette, the shape of the family, and then visualizing every angle of the game. Then came the real work. We optimized and built the final set of elements the users play with with all the relevant details: The father grew a beard. The girl got a bow. The can developed facial expressions. We final characters each refined and modeled by hand, until weve build a world that felt alive and adequate.

We knew that a users attention span is 90 seconds at best. The game had to let people load, play, win and check out in less than that. To pull that off, we used a lot of different components working together. React Three Fiber with baked textures and instanced shelf models to cut draw calls. Hand-animated characters, rive for the confetti, a custom Howler hook for sound, a Neon Postgres database behind the global highscore and Cloudflare in front of everything. We compressed every asset until the whole game shipped under 20 MB.

We got really attached to the pea can peaquito. Somewhere between the 3D clearance and the launch, the can and the girl stopped being just assets for us and started becoming people we joked about. The amount of related memes we created werent a deliverable though, but a super fun side effect.