A festival manager on brain rest became creative director of a tiny AI game

The Living Museum The Living Museum started almost by accident. ChatGPT and I were talking about what would be fun to build as a one-shot project. We brainstormed an idea for a magical little museum, wrote one big prompt together, and gave it to Claude to program. What came back was so unexpectedly cute and full of possibility that I couldn't stop thinking about it. So instead of leaving it as a one-shot experiment, I started building the full vision. The Living Museum is now a cozy, relaxing game about wandering through a strange and beautiful museum that feels alive. It is filled with fossils, impossible plants, ocean creatures, celestial objects, lost gods, curiosities, hidden places, characters, animals, and small things to discover. There is no pressure to win or rush through it. I want it to feel like somewhere you can simply wander, explore, be curious, and feel good being there. I also wanted it to be a little living world that could exist beside your real one. You could leave the Museum open while you're working at your desk and tune in and out throughout the day. Visitors come and go. Sometimes a peculiar guest wanders in. Sometimes an exhibit comes alive and starts walking around. A traveler might give you a rare gift they found somewhere far away. Our morning is their morning. The doorman opens the Museum and visitors begin arriving. At night, the visitors leave and the Museum goes to sleep. It has also become very personal. I put myself and my two children, Mia and Luka, into the Museum as characters, and now they give me ideas for things that should happen inside it. So in a funny way, I'm building a little world with my kids, too. This project also came at a very unexpected time in my life. Last year I suffered a traumatic brain injury, and I am still in recovery. I actually had to pause AI Mastery for a period and go on brain rest before I began this project. So, somewhat hilariously, I have been building a game while technically still on brain rest. In some ways, that made what I learned about AI even more meaningful. I couldn't approach this by trying to personally learn and execute every discipline involved in making a game. I had to learn how to hold the vision, think clearly about the next step, communicate it, review what came back, and work with AI to carry much of the execution. This submission is the first playable demo of a much larger vision. There are still places to smooth over, but the first playable milestone is here. I plan to continue building The Living Museum after AI Mastery and eventually release it for sale so other people can wander through it too. How I Built It My professional background is actually in management. I was previously a general manager for a festival company, and I realized that those skills translated surprisingly well here. I essentially became the general manager and creative director of my own tiny AI game studio. I work primarily with ChatGPT and Claude together. ChatGPT and I develop the vision, brainstorm, solve problems, make creative decisions, create the character and Museum artwork, and figure out how to communicate what we want. Then I work with Claude to build and vibe-code the experience. We go back and forth constantly as the Museum evolves. What surprised me is how natural this way of creating eventually began to feel. I don't need to know how to personally perform every job involved in making a game. My role is to hold the vision, know what feels right, make decisions, communicate clearly, QC what comes back, and learn how to direct the intelligence available to me. And I've been building it pretty much in all my free time, largely because I'm having so much fun. What I Learned The biggest thing I learned from AI Mastery was simply how to work with AI. The individual tools and tricks were helpful, but the fundamentals changed everything for me: prompt engineering, mindset, context, iteration, clear thinking, and learning how to communicate an intention well enough that AI can actually help bring it to life. I learned that good prompting isn't just about finding the perfect words or writing a giant prompt. It's learning how to think through what you actually want, what matters most, what shouldn't change, what information the AI needs, and how to respond when the result isn't right. One of my biggest unlocks was realizing that I could direct AI to help write the prompts themselves. In the beginning, I thought I had to constantly write and rewrite every prompt manually to make things happen. Now my role looks very different. I set the vision, discuss and problem-solve with ChatGPT, direct, steer, QC and debug. Together we determine the next steps and create the prompts, and I review the decisions and outputs along the way. That changed my relationship with AI completely. I also learned not to treat AI like a magic button. The more I worked with it, the more it became a creative collaboration. Sometimes I direct. Sometimes I ask questions. Sometimes ChatGPT notices something I haven't considered. Sometimes Claude builds something unexpected that gives me another idea. Then I make the final call, and we keep going. That mindset has probably been the most valuable thing I've taken from the program so far. Before this, I would have assumed that creating a game like The Living Museum required me to first become technically qualified to make one. Instead, I learned how to hold the vision and lead the process. And somewhere between learning prompt engineering, recovering my brain, and happily vibe-coding every day, a one-shot class experiment turned into a little living world that I genuinely want to keep building. Playable Demo: The project is included in the attached ZIP file. To launch The Living Museum, unzip the folder and open the file labeled “Click Here” in a web browser.