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.
Maybe I don't know enough about spreadsheets but two dimensions isn't enough for most applications. Maybe pivot tables? They are too hard to figure out. Need something like "SQLSheet" that takes a more complex data structure and presents viewing and editing it in a natural way with drill down and joins etc. AI should be able to help you design the DB and then create a tool to interact with it.
The people using these sheets have no idea what you’re talking about. They use multiple sheets to layer the dimensions and understand pivot tables perfectly.
Are people who understand relational databases and people who understand pivot tables disjoint sets?
I can look at someone’s finished pivot table and reproduce it from the data through other means, but any explanation of what a pivot table actually is and does reads like pure gibberish to me.
Probably. A pivot table is basically a way to turn on one of the dimensions of the sheet to make sense of the data. Like "show me all invoices, grouped by date and sum each group". It is effectively a query, in a way that makes sense for people working in spreadsheets.
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 number of monsters on the screen doesn't seem to affect playing speed for me, but when the wall of fire appears it slows down the game very noticeably. (Using Firefox on desktop.)
I’m not impressed by ChatGPT writing the code for this game. The author has beyond average vision and taste. I’m excited to see what other creative little geniuses will be able to do when these tools get better and cheaper. I think creatively we are living a moment comparable to the introduction of portable 35mm cameras in the 1920s.
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.
Damn this hit me in a weird spot. The game looks fun, but the fact that you said "i cannot code" and managed to pull this off with sloppy ai is really scary.
I know this is just fun and games, but i cant even start to imagine what the code is like.
I'm not here to defend generative AI (in fact, I'd say do not use it unless you already know the language/framework well enough to clean up the output) but we have got to stop arguing from a place that assumes humans don't produce sloppy code in equally alarming volumes.
About half of my week is spend troubleshooting old legacy code for this or that industrial automation devices and PLCs, the latter being their own animal driven by ladder logic. Regardless if it's some firmware in C, some proprietary app pounded out in some ancient .NET version or just plane old PLC programming, the amount of times I have puzzled over what the heck the original programmer was thinking is mind blowing. Prior to moving into this position, I had no idea what the crufty greybeards meant when they were griping about spaghetti code. Now I do. Stepping back through someone else's work, often done with some kind of set-it-forget-it mindset because, for some reason, people create things and ignore that the environment will eventually change, is the biggest, dumbest headache. So dumb, that about a year ago, I start practicing things like writing firmware from scratch because just starting from zero turned out to be easier than trying to fix someone's old, convoluted mess.
Most humans code crap. Some humans code very, very well and write beautiful, eloquent software as a result. Congrats to those in that crowd, but understand they are the minority. So, when we started feeding a stochastic parrot some code to teach it to do our work for use, we fed it garbage. And what happens when garbage goes in?
This reminds me of the old Mac shareware game BOOM, which is a (very well made) Bomberman clone with Doom assets. I would recommend anyone who likes Doom or Bomberman to try it!
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.
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.
I just Doomscrolled 1878 meters and killed 3482 monsters. How far can you get?
Great game! Few impressions of the gameplay
- Way easier on laptop compared to mobile; the monsters still spawn at the bottom of the viewport so you can camp at the top much further away on a laptop
- The game almost gets easier the more powered up you get. To make it more challenging you could consider speeding up the lava at the top
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.
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.
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?
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.
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?"
I'm honestly impressed. I've seen many early games where countless concepts were tried (with mixed results) and you've found something entirely new with extra points for it's extreme simplicity.
Is this inspired by Death by Scrolling, the upcoming video game by Ron Gilbert?
https://www.grumpygamer.com/deathbyscrolling5/
Even the fire effect coming after you look similar.
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.
Maybe I don't know enough about spreadsheets but two dimensions isn't enough for most applications. Maybe pivot tables? They are too hard to figure out. Need something like "SQLSheet" that takes a more complex data structure and presents viewing and editing it in a natural way with drill down and joins etc. AI should be able to help you design the DB and then create a tool to interact with it.
The people using these sheets have no idea what you’re talking about. They use multiple sheets to layer the dimensions and understand pivot tables perfectly.
Are people who understand relational databases and people who understand pivot tables disjoint sets?
I can look at someone’s finished pivot table and reproduce it from the data through other means, but any explanation of what a pivot table actually is and does reads like pure gibberish to me.
Probably. A pivot table is basically a way to turn on one of the dimensions of the sheet to make sense of the data. Like "show me all invoices, grouped by date and sum each group". It is effectively a query, in a way that makes sense for people working in spreadsheets.
Microsoft Access?
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 number of monsters on the screen doesn't seem to affect playing speed for me, but when the wall of fire appears it slows down the game very noticeably. (Using Firefox on desktop.)
The Photographerizationing of software engineering has come.
Cracked me up for some reason. Thanks for the laugh!!
> It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.
It existed with adobe flash. As much as programmers hated flash, it allowed artists with little technical skills to create awesome mini games.
I’m not impressed by ChatGPT writing the code for this game. The author has beyond average vision and taste. I’m excited to see what other creative little geniuses will be able to do when these tools get better and cheaper. I think creatively we are living a moment comparable to the introduction of portable 35mm cameras in the 1920s.
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.
> Can a game work where all you do is scroll?
Yes. MVP: <https://sc.rollc.at/>
Damn this hit me in a weird spot. The game looks fun, but the fact that you said "i cannot code" and managed to pull this off with sloppy ai is really scary.
I know this is just fun and games, but i cant even start to imagine what the code is like.
I'm not here to defend generative AI (in fact, I'd say do not use it unless you already know the language/framework well enough to clean up the output) but we have got to stop arguing from a place that assumes humans don't produce sloppy code in equally alarming volumes.
About half of my week is spend troubleshooting old legacy code for this or that industrial automation devices and PLCs, the latter being their own animal driven by ladder logic. Regardless if it's some firmware in C, some proprietary app pounded out in some ancient .NET version or just plane old PLC programming, the amount of times I have puzzled over what the heck the original programmer was thinking is mind blowing. Prior to moving into this position, I had no idea what the crufty greybeards meant when they were griping about spaghetti code. Now I do. Stepping back through someone else's work, often done with some kind of set-it-forget-it mindset because, for some reason, people create things and ignore that the environment will eventually change, is the biggest, dumbest headache. So dumb, that about a year ago, I start practicing things like writing firmware from scratch because just starting from zero turned out to be easier than trying to fix someone's old, convoluted mess.
Most humans code crap. Some humans code very, very well and write beautiful, eloquent software as a result. Congrats to those in that crowd, but understand they are the minority. So, when we started feeding a stochastic parrot some code to teach it to do our work for use, we fed it garbage. And what happens when garbage goes in?
Spoiler : the code is not so bad
This reminds me of the old Mac shareware game BOOM, which is a (very well made) Bomberman clone with Doom assets. I would recommend anyone who likes Doom or Bomberman to try it!
Thanks! FYI https://silverweed.github.io/boom/
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.
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.
If you did this at work, relax; it just means you've finally "made it" in your career!
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
https://vibeware.vercel.app/
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..)
theres about 15-20 games
you can add your own!
I put it together quite quickly for @levelsio vibe coded games competition
https://x.com/levelsio/status/1915127796097290534
originally it had levels and bosses but The code got too messy. I'm thinking about coming back to it and adding some more games.
I don't use instagram or any social media actively so didn't know about double tap!
will add it to the todo list.
4242 ;_;
Also those aren’t fire hydrants
tptacek spotted
hahaha this is so good
I crashed it by dying at the same time as getting a 100-kill power up (chrome, iOS)
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.
Proof for there being still some pretty simple ideas to be explored. – Well done.
I just Doomscrolled 1878 meters and killed 3482 monsters. How far can you get?
Great game! Few impressions of the gameplay - Way easier on laptop compared to mobile; the monsters still spawn at the bottom of the viewport so you can camp at the top much further away on a laptop - The game almost gets easier the more powered up you get. To make it more challenging you could consider speeding up the lava at the top
This is awesome!
Finally camped by the health and was rewarded with...one health.
Kept hoping the +spread would shoot closer to down.
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.
OMG this is a great game! Simple and addicting, congrats!
This is a genius little game. Haven't had this much silly fun since Captain Comic days.
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.
Strangely compelling. Nice idea
Clever idea, this is why indie games are so fantastic. They explore ideas that no studio would touch, until...
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.
Fun!
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.
It is a part of life, why shouldn’t it be in games? Does it cease existing if you don’t see it?
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
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.
thank god our jobs are safe
a good start! (reminds me of a simpler, bullet-hell variant of absolute legend "Doug Dug")
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.
Pretty fun. I enjoyed.
Cool!
I'm honestly impressed. I've seen many early games where countless concepts were tried (with mixed results) and you've found something entirely new with extra points for it's extreme simplicity.