AI tools used (or “None”)
Claude Code (Anthropic) — design discussion, writing code, debugging, an automated test suite, and an automated playtest harness. No AI image generators and no AI audio: all art is drawn in code with Canvas, all sound is synthesized at runtime with the Web Audio API.

How I built it / process notes
We designed it in conversation first, then built it. Two things did most of the work. (1) An automated test suite that runs headless (#test) — it caught real bugs, like villagers being pushed off the board and walking through houses. (2) An automated playtest harness: a BFS pathfinder drives the game at different tilt strengths and reports clear time, villagers knocked over, and how full the water got. It found that two stages were literally impossible — a tree was sealing a corridor — and that playing gently and playing hard produced identical results, meaning the central choice of the game did not exist. Both were fixed because of it. The art is drawn in code, the sound is synthesized, and the whole game is two files.

How does your game use the theme?
ROCK is both the object and the verb here. You move a ROCK by ROCKING the board it sits on — you never touch the rock itself.

The title is the English idiom "between a rock and a hard place": stuck between two bad options. That idiom is also the rule of the game. Tilt gently and nobody falls over, but the water keeps rising. Tilt hard and you reach the leak in time, but the villagers go down. There is no way to save them without shaking them.