DON'T PANIC

Play DON'T PANIC free in your browser: an adventure game with nothing to download and no sign-up. It takes after Experimental. Opus 5 wrote the code; the prompt that produced it is on this page.

About DON'T PANIC

It asks you a question first. Any question. Then it wakes you on your own couch at four in the morning with something about space on the television, and stops being ordinary.

Your Improbability Drive re-rolls reality: the genre, the dimension, the art style and the rules, all at once, with no explanation.

Eleven hand-built places and about half a million generated ones. A woman with four heads takes your furniture away piece by piece until nothing is left but a square of floorboards in an ocean, and a very clear reflection of you. Open space with no suit, where the drive threw a good deal of furniture out alongside you and catching it is all that keeps you conscious. A corridor of every question anybody ever asked, each a door into the next. A white room a kilometre and a half across with your question on the far wall at the size of a hill, one wooden chair, and a floor that eventually gets up and dances in neon. A dive down through the pixels, the bytecode, the logic gates and the sand, which asks you to write the code that gets you back in ones and zeros, admits that was a joke, and then shows you your compiler errors.

A man with a jar of pickles lets you wander his ship, has an opinion about everything in it, and asks where you would like dropping. It is the only choice the game offers you.

How was DON'T PANIC made?

Creator

Drakoniux

Model

Opus 5Anthropic

Effort

Max

Tokens used

6,965,000

Build time

421 min

The prompt behind DON'T PANIC

The brief was deliberately vague, as a test: a game about The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy, "very adventurous, philosophical, sometimes funny, and leaves you being excited about the future." Every other decision left to the model.

It took four builds, and the user drove every correction.

1.0 was first-person exploration where Guide entries were the inventory. Verdict: "this is not a game, this is just words, and I am walking."

2.0 was an action salvage run. Verdict: "I am just walking near objects and they are disappearing, and every world is the same map with different colours."

3.0 was the user's own idea and a far better game than either of mine: make the drive re-roll REALITY rather than objects, with maximum contrast and no explanation, because unpredictability is what makes it feel like an adventure. Six realms, each owning its own renderer, rules, HUD and controls. But the exits were hidden inside each realm's own fiction, and the verdict was: "I was able only to shoot things, and I never get into another game."

4.0 fixes that and takes the rest of the user's brief literally. The exit is now a key, on screen, always, filling on its own in every realm — a ten-minute test session makes 42 jumps where the old build managed 3. The user asked for a waking-up scene, a four-headed woman removing the furniture, an ocean with your reflection in it, a corridor of questions from birth to death, a monumentally massive white space, a dive into ones and zeros with a joke and a switch at the bottom, a real ten-minute cage that tells you to go outside, a question asked before the game starts, and quotes and existential questions scattered about. All of that is in.

The user also asked for "millions of possibilities... anything you do, anywhere you go, produces completely different outcomes... if we could fundamentally redesign how games are made, like web listings, we could have 1000+ scenarios that don't cost much." So scenes became data: a format of palettes, grounds, prop kits, beings and physics rules, plus a name grammar. 492,800 combinations, one generic engine that plays any of them, and a new place costs about nine lines.

Vanilla JS, no engine, no assets. Writing that appears in the world is a 5x7 font made of boxes. The harness force-visits every realm, runs 24 drift seeds, walks the scripted arc, and plays a live session.

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Version 6.0 · updated 2026-09-07

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