It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.
This kind of language is fascinating/terrifying:
> I assume doing all this computationally is more processor-intensive than using pre-rendered monsters, but it’s very smooth for me on both desktop and phone, so it must not be too intensive. I guess I’ll hear from people if it’s choppy on their device.
I think the nature of our profession as coders is in process of shifting very rapidly, from "write code to do something useful" to "write code to do something useful, better than I could vibe code myself".
Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.
On the other hand, as someone who can code in certain domains (web, maps), I could definitely see myself vibe coding as a way to quickly create something in a domain where I have no expertise (eg, Unity).
We already had to beat "I made a spreadsheet", which continues to be pretty damn hard even for large teams of experienced engineers - ask your finance team sometime how many custom spreadsheets they use regularly.
A) Lots of useful apps aren't a great fit for a spreadsheet. AI seems to be opening many of those up the same way.
B) Lots of spreadsheets have bugs which cause then to give wildly inaccurate results, which are relied on to make crucial decisions. AI is also repeating this part of the pattern.
If you need it to work correctly all the time, there's still no substitute for expertise - but looking at the state of computing, clearly many people are willing to use things that have obvious, serious bugs.
In theory, I'm a fan of it. I think getting a working mock-up as a demonstration of an idea is far better than building something from a few napkin sketches and then iterating while we close in on the original vision.
As for my own work, I just spent a couple hours this afternoon in a back and forth discussion with claude code, asking it to mock up a UI for me before "we" start building it tomorrow. It was just a mock-up, so I didn't require precision, but I was impressed with some tidbits that came along for the ride.
Some things it did without me asking
* Mock data for the lists and pages in json format, so I could easily add records to it for different scenarios
* Working navigation between pages, including modals
* Working progress bars and timers
* Working list sorts and filters
* Toasts for functionality that was beyond the scope of the mock-up ("sending email to author of post" or "banning user")
* Not-half-bad animations and transitions between pages, screens, modals, etc
* A responsive layout that worked better than expected on mobile and desktop
* Some ideas I hadn't considered, that we then expanded upon
I would have mocked this up for a client, but not for myself. It's quite nice to have a working html / javascript / css mockup to play with while I flesh out my own ideas - with a benefit that I actually fully understand the output and can tweak it myself as needed.
The Photographerizationing of software engineering has come.
The game Is genuinely great even tho I think there's something off with the slide sensitivity.
Also, this is the first time I'm genuinely impressed by some LLM coded output, bravo to both you and chatgpt.
You may not be able to code, but the fact that you identified the need for asset editor tooling ("lab") entirely on your own, and built and used it successfully tells me you'd probably make a great engineer.
You also invented a movement control method I have never seen before - please keep making games.
> I had ChatGPT build labs with sliders that I could adjust to decide how I want things to appear, instead of getting frustrated with the chatbot.
Your very own Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set[1].
(It is of course very common to do all sorts of game art using ad hoc parametric stuff like this, I just find the similarity amusing.)
[1] https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html
This 100% occurred to me as I did it. I may not be a coder but I did read the Steve Jobs biography.
Would love an option to adjust the "mouse sensitivity", and flicking(is that the right term? I mean that the momentum from scrolling continues even if you lift your finger from the screen). Right now movement feels a mite heavy, I'm scrolling like three times as much as I'd find comfortable.
Aside from that, this might become my new favorite time waster of the week.
I used ai to make a simple game for a hackathon:
you are an ai gathering training data
its a bit like warioware with an extremly annoying soundtrack
came 2nd! thanks claude
It's really cool ! How many games are there ?
(Also I was dissapointed that double-tapping the picture for the Instagram one didn't work..)
tptacek spotted
hahaha this is so good
That was a lot of fun, and far too addictive to play on a weekday!
I feel like you are forced to get the power upgrades at first to get past the larger roadblocks before the fire wall hits you, but maybe this is avoidable if you're fast enough.
Finally, a game that accurately simulates my daily productivity. I open it intending to play for 5 minutes and somehow 3 hours later I'm still there, having accomplished nothing useful, with a vague sense of dread and the feeling that demons are chasing me. The verisimilitude is uncanny.
Proof for there being still some pretty simple ideas to be explored. – Well done.
This is awesome!
Finally camped by the health and was rewarded with...one health.
Kept hoping the +spread would shoot closer to down.
Love to see that people are able to create games without technical barriers. Being able to bring your ideas to life is such a powerful thing and it's great that more people can experience that
Really nice. Cool mechanic. I wish it was a little bit harder, though. At 2000m, I just sort of got bored, because the weapon was so powered up that all of the enemies died instantly.
Lava is a nice touch. And the backscroll feels like a cheat code tbh
Great game! I like the share button copying to clipboards ha ha.
Clever idea, this is why indie games are so fantastic. They explore ideas that no studio would touch, until...
Am I the only one who finds in bad taste to use "Epstein victims demand release ..." in the game? Is rape and pedophilia already normalized and I didn't notice?
It pulls news headlines via RSS feed, so the developer didn't intentionally put that headline in the game.
The game is just pulling news headlines - specific text isn't being intentionally included.
It’s a live RSS feed of New York Times articles.
Out GTAed GTA
Cool, but I came across a headline for some reason about Charlie Kirk and wondered what the hell that was about, I left the game shortly after.
This is mentioned in the piece, it's a further play on the idea of 'Doomscrolling'
"I was pretty happy with the game and ready to share it. But then at the last minute I got another nagging idea in the back of my mind: What if it was somehow more like actual doomscrolling?
It would be easy to get an RSS Feed of headlines from a news site. Could I make them appear in the game as you scroll, in a way that felt integrated with the game?"
Because he was shot today, it was in the news, and the game pulls a live feed of news articles via RSS to simulate doom scrolling.
a good start! (reminds me of a simpler, bullet-hell variant of absolute legend "Doug Dug")
Cool!
Pretty fun. I enjoyed.
Kind of concerning what a non- programmer can do with vibe coding... On the other hand, it's somewhat reassuring that the game is clearly missing scroll inertia/momentum. I guess he didn't yet get the language model to do it for him.