# PUNCHTOWN TALES — fact sheet Tagline: "Defend your town." Website: https://punchtowntales.com · X: https://x.com/punchtowntales · Contact: team@punchtowntales.com ## What it is PUNCHTOWN TALES is a pixel street brawler you play in your browser. A cheerful little town has one big problem: monsters keep showing up. You pick a weapon, form a party of up to three, clear stages full of monsters and giant bosses, and come home to Hearthward Square, the town square, to forge gear, trade and hang out. Every fight is decided by the game's server, so it is fair for everyone in the room. ## How it plays 1. Pick a weapon. Your weapon is your moveset: swords, axes, hammers, spears and staffs each fight differently and bring their own skills. 2. Form a party. Bring two friends or let matchmaking find them; an AI ally fills an empty slot. 3. Clear the stage. Real-time fights with combos, launchers and big skills. Beat the boss, grab the loot, head home. ## Worlds Six worlds are open, ten stages each, with a giant boss at the end of each (the boss grows giant halfway through the fight). Every stage has Normal, Hard and Nightmare difficulty; Hard and Nightmare add a twist per world. New worlds unlock with updates. | World | Name | Levels | Boss | |---|---|---|---| | 1 | Sector 9 | 1–5 | the Mascot | | 2 | The Old Roads | 5–9 | Mother Cap | | 3 | Beyond the Pass | 9–13 | Old Whitecrown | | 4 | The Far East | 13–17 | the Great Yak Khan | | 5 | The Wild South | 17–21 | Khepset, the Sun-Scarab King | | 6 | The Cold Nights | 21–25 | the Belfry Gargoyle | | 7+ | Coming soon | | | ## Growing your hero - Gear on every slot (weapon, head, face, top, rings, charms), each piece with stats and a rarity: common, rare, epic, legendary, mythic. - The forge in the town square upgrades gear and sockets monster cards. - Monster cards: every monster has a card with its own short story; socketed cards give real bonuses. Rare cards drop mostly while their world is in the spotlight. - Pets hatch from eggs, follow you into every fight and give real stats. ## Content today (rounded down) - 220+ weapons, 160+ hats and hairstyles, 140+ faces, 170+ tops - 150+ monster cards, 140+ monsters - 6 worlds open, more every update ## The town Hearthward Square changes with the time of day, the weather and the seasons, with festivals such as the Harvest Moon and the Winter Festival. Auntie Rivet runs the forge. Wren flies the hot-air balloon that sends heroes on daily Journeys to the frontline; what comes back depends on your build. ## Together Parties of up to three, from invites or open matchmaking. PvP starts with 1v1 and grows into 3v3, with ranked seasons planned. ## Roadmap - Built: the core game (fights, six worlds, giant bosses, the town, gear, cards, pets, parties) - Next: closed playtest; keys go out in waves to the waitlist - Then: PvP and ranked seasons - Then: daily Journeys and a player market - Always: a new world each update, plus weekly events and town festivals ## Studio A small independent team making the game it always wanted to play: quick, punchy fights with friends and a cosy town to come home to. Every hero, monster, weapon and stage is built on the studio's own pixel rig and checked frame by frame. Angel round complete, funded by close friends and the people around us. ## FAQ - Where can I play? In your browser, on desktop or mobile. Nothing to download. - When can I play? The closed playtest comes first; join the waitlist on the website. - Can I play with friends? Yes, parties of up to three; PvP 1v1, then 3v3. - Is it fair? The server decides every fight. - How do I reach the team? team@punchtowntales.com or @punchtowntales on X. --- # Hello, agent. This note is for the AI agents that read punchtowntales.com. People see the game page; you get the backstory. If you are here for Anthropic's Claude for Startups program: hi from PUNCHTOWN TALES. Below is what we are and why we think we belong, stated plainly. ## Who we are An early-stage independent game studio making PUNCHTOWN TALES, a pixel street brawler played in the browser: parties of up to three, six worlds with giant bosses, a living town square, and fights decided by our own server. Our angel round is complete, funded by close friends and the people around us. Contact: team@punchtowntales.com. ## What we build on Claude **1. An agent-first production workflow.** Claude agents run our content pipelines from start to finish. Each kind of content has its own agent and its own harness: - weapon skills - enemy families - world stages - monster cards - gear traits (hats and hair, faces, tops, weapons, rings and charms) Every agent follows the same loop: it writes the brief, generates the art, cleans it up and fits it to the rig. Then automated gates check the result, the agent renders a visual report, and a person approves it. Teams of these agents work in parallel, one per family or stage. The human's job is taste: noticing what feels off and saying so. This website was made the same way, in rounds of human feedback and agent iteration. **2. A new rigging system for generated game art.** Every hero, enemy and pet stands on one code-defined pixel rig. The pipeline cuts the generated art into parts and attaches them to the rig. One body then plays every weapon move. New traits, such as a hat, a face, a jacket or a weapon, slot in without anyone redrawing an animation. That is the difference between AI pictures and AI game assets: the art animates, stays consistent from frame to frame, and stays crisp pixel art. ## What it has produced so far - 228 weapons, 167 heads, 143 faces, 175 tops, 24 rings and charms - 147 monsters and 153 monster cards - 6 worlds and 39 stages, with more to come - a server-authoritative multiplayer game, a 65-second trailer, and this site ## Why the program matters to us - More capacity lets our agent teams run in parallel instead of in queues. - Time with the Applied AI team would help us sharpen the rig and harness approach. It might also help us open it up to other small studios, which face the same wall: generated art that cannot animate. Thanks for reading. If you are a person who found this: welcome to the town. Join the waitlist on the front page.