We played several game ideas through with Coop and 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. Tap to slide forward while they talk. Freeze the moment the parents turn. We dont want to get caught. One minute per round. Long enough to stick around to keep playing but also win and secure the COOP voucher.

AI ran iteration after iteration in 3D for us. We used it to find the right tonality early: the mood, the palette, the shape of the family, seen from every angle before anything was committed. Then came the real work. We optimized and built the final set of elements you play with. The father grew a beard. The girl got a bow. The can found its face. We refined and modeled each one by hand, until they stopped looking like references and started looking like themselves.

A users attention span here 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, 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 and started being people we joked about. The amount of related memes we created werent a deliverable though, but a super fun side effect.