Skip to main content
Skip to main content

AI

I vibe coded a point-and-click game to learn about the Drupal AI Ecosystem

Mac Packwala and the Curse of the Stale Cache is a point-and-click adventure where you escape an island by learning Drupal AI. You can play it in your browser right now.

New ways to present it

The Drupal AI ecosystem has grown fast. The ecosystem list in the AI Dashboard documentation counted 379 modules and 40 recipes on October 8, 2026. Most people, even people who build Drupal sites every day, don't know what half of them do, or that they exist at all. More documentation and more talks won't fix that on their own. We need to find new ways to present it.

The good news is that presenting information just got a lot easier because of AI. In 2024, Google's NotebookLM started turning documents into a podcast-style conversation with one click. On this site, posts come with a spoken version, an AI podcast and narrated slides, and I recorded none of them. Something interactive used to be the most expensive way to explain a thing. Now it is within reach of one person with a few evenings.

Games are worth that effort. A 2013 meta-analysis of serious games by Wouters and colleagues found that people learned more from them, and remembered more, than from lectures, reading or drill. (Interestingly, they were not more motivated by them.)

I grew up with games like King's Quest, Police Quest, Monkey Island and Day of the Tentacle. So I wanted to see if I could recreate a similar experience with Drupal AI: a game where you learn what providers, automators, agents and MCP are by using them to get off an island.

I vibe coded it. I wrote the story on a high level, but the AI drew the art and made the technical decisions. I picked the music and the voices, kept an eye on the costs and gave it the list of Drupal modules it was allowed to talk about. I also spent a godawful amount of time discussing jokes back and forth with it before I was happy. I mostly spent time on that because it was pretty enjoyable.

Here is the trailer.

2:36
Pixel-art harbour with a harbour office, a sign reading "Rewrite done in: 2 weeks", a lighthouse in the distance and Mac on the pier.

./escape-island.sh

Play Mac Packwala

Play it in your browser, or download it for Windows, macOS or Linux. Nothing to install on a server: it runs completely in the browser. Want to see how it is made? Download the source code and build it yourself.

Mac Packwala and the Curse of the Stale Cache

Mac Packwala is a Drupal site builder who wakes up under a sail on Legacy Island, an island of stale CMSs that no map has ever shown. To get off it, he has to learn the Drupal AI ecosystem: providers, automators, agents, Tool API tools, an MCP client, a Slack MCP server and finally an MCP server with a geolocation tool, so Captain Node can find him and come to the rescue. With the speed the ecosystem is evolving, the game might need a sequel next week. :)

It is a classic point-and-click adventure: verbs like Pick up, Use and Talk to, about 60 puzzles over three acts, and a rubber duck that gives you a hint when you are stuck. You start as Anonymous and work your way up to Authenticated, Editor and Site Builder. The jokes come in two layers. The universal ones come first: cookie banners, READMEs nobody reads, a bartender who is a .gitignore and ignores everything you say. The Drupal jokes sit on top, and everything Drupal you look at explains in plain English what it really is. You can't die, and you can't get stuck for good.

All of the art, the font and the interface are drawn in code onto a 320 × 200 canvas: about 15,000 lines of TypeScript and not a single image file. The music and the voices were generated with ElevenLabs.

How it was built

It doesn't use a game engine, just vanilla TypeScript built with Vite. It is completely frontend based. There is no backend: the game is a folder of static files that runs in your browser and saves to your browser's local storage. That way you can point your agent at the website, both to ask whether it is safe for your computer to play and to get a walkthrough, since all the solutions are right there in the JavaScript. :) The desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux is the same build in Electron, packaged with electron-builder by GitHub Actions. On purpose, I didn't ask the AI to suggest solutions; I just vibed ahead. The code is a mess, and anyone taking it over would have a hard time figuring it out.

I will write a follow-up post about my general feelings around vibe coding: why it is probably bad for you in the long run, and when it makes sense.

Please play it and let me know what you think! The whole game is available as source code, including the agent files, so it should be possible to point your agent at it and make your own adventure!

And if you get stuck, there is a walkthrough.

Chapters

5 min read

Other ways to consume this

Filed under AI Drupal AI
AI modified

This content was produced by AI and edited by a person.

How was AI used?

AI takes my rambling notes, structures them and writes a first draft. I then prompt it to use interactive components, and at the end I read through it and rewrite it until it says what I want it to say.