There's a document I've been building for two years that does something most pitch decks don't.
You can show it to a publisher and it looks like a pitch. Every slide earns its place. The logline, the comps, the store copy, the build status. The art direction is consistent and deliberate — noir Italian cinema palette, amber and gunmetal on near-black, Rajdhani for the headers, Share Tech Mono for the body. It looks like something.
You can also paste the whole thing into Claude at 2am and say build the next feature and the model knows exactly where it is. The tone pillars. The forbidden patterns. The dice mechanics. The Nonna Standard. The event queue rules. The fact that you cannot call Image.asset() directly. The fact that emoji are not permitted anywhere in the game text because emojis are web-app language and web-app language fails the Nonna Standard.
Most documents are written for one audience. This one is written for two. That is the thing Claude Design makes possible, and it took me a while to understand that's what I was building.
What Claude Design is.
The artifact feature in Claude — the ability to generate and iterate on a rendered HTML document inside the conversation — changed the way I think about game documentation. A pitch deck is not a PDF anymore. It's a living object. You iterate on it with the model the way you iterate on code. You describe what's missing. The model refines. You check the render. You push back on the tone.
The Pizza Connection pitch deck is a custom <deck-stage> web component driving 29 slides. The CSS does the heavy lifting on the presentation layer — every design token is a variable, every color is functional, the typography system enforces the tone at the mechanical level. It looks designed because it was designed. In Claude. Iteratively. Over months.
The actual process looked like this:
"I need to feed this to Claude CLI in VSCode later, so let's stack it with relevant info that sets atmosphere and improves our game understanding of the code — both for humans and AI."
And Claude's response was to ask what format, what depth, what tone rules. Questions answered: rich HTML doc, all of it, keep atmosphere so the final polishes stay in the universe. The six tone pillars expanded. Screen and widget naming conventions. Forbidden patterns. Event queue rules. Economy and balance constants. The Arcade Mandate. The Nonna kidnapping cycle.
Then the font complaint — "the text is too small, needs to be bigger, more arcade style font, not this pizza menu shit." The model fixed it. Then: "I liked it better as slides — that was much nicer, I just wanted to make the first document longer." Pivot. One long deck instead of a bible, pitch and bible merged, never cramped, never rushing.
The Nonna kidnap image arrived mid-session with a markdown doc explaining the system. The model read the doc, copied the image path, built a dedicated slide with the three-path rescue flow and the full flag documentation. Then the Arch Enemy system file came in. It got its own page too.
That is the workflow. Iterative. Conversational. The model holds the whole context. You push back. It adjusts. The document is a conversation you can freeze and hand to the next session.
I've been making games and tools and writing with Claude for two years. Claude Design is genuinely great — and I mean that as someone who stress-tests AI tools for a living and has opinions about what counts as useful versus what counts as impressive. Design is useful. The artifact loop is tight enough to feel like a real working session. You push back, it adjusts, the render updates, you push back again. There's no friction between the idea and the thing you can look at.
Anthropic gave early access to this and it changed how I document. The Pizza Connection pitch deck exists in its current form because of it — 29 slides, fully navigable, a document that serves two masters. That doesn't happen in Google Slides.
This is not the article where I explain what Claude Design is step by step. This is the article where I give you the whole thing.
The pitch.
HBO prestige drama meets 1990s coin-op arcade. One lifetime. Six phases. No two runs the same. Nothing plays like this.
That's the logline. It does all the work. When the first slide fades in and that line lands, the conversation is already half over. The publisher either hears it or they don't. The tone alone is the moat.
The Pizza Connection is a single-player, stat-driven crime saga for iPad and Steam. You play a lifetime, not a history. The Ceremony sets your dice. The Contemporary collects the debt. Everything in between is yours to ruin.
The world runs on three tone pillars. AMARO — bittersweet tragedy, every victory has a cost, a baptism and a massacre in the same church, the sacred and the profane on the same altar. ARCADE CAMP — 1990s coin-op absurdity sitting inside prestige drama, the contrast is intentional, jackpot versus permanent scar. GENERATIONAL WEIGHT — you are playing a lifetime, the Ceremony sets, the Contemporary collects, everything in between is the accounting.
Those three pillars are in the pitch. They are also the creative north star for every screen in the game.
Six phases. One lifetime. No rewind.
Phase I — Ceremony. The blood oath in Nonna's kitchen. The dice fall for the first time. The Arch Enemy is assigned.
Phase II — Origins. Establishing power. Every street corner is a negotiation. The Family Boss watches.
Phase III — Expansion. Aggressive growth. Territory wars. The empire stretches across locations worldwide.
Phase IV — Golden. Maximum influence. Maximum exposure. The most dangerous moment — when everything is working.
Phase V — Decline. Internal rot. External heat. Betrayal from within. The Arch Enemy circles closer.
Phase VI — Contemporary. Digital laundering. Legacy and reckoning. The Contemporary collects the debt.
Each phase shifts the mechanics, the stakes, the atmosphere. There is no rewind. There is no respawn. The run ends exactly once.
The dice.
D4 through D20. Skull Multipliers that compound outcomes ×2 through ×5. Starting capital rolled at the Ceremony: (3d6 × 100) + 700 WADD — a range of 1,000 to 2,500 Walking Around Dough.
