Test-n-Tell - tiny apps, Big ideas

  In the last article, I covered the first proper playtest of my game and how I organised it. A lot of the feedback I received wasn't actually about gameplay. People commented on the visual style, how the game looked on different devices, whether things felt too small or too big, and whether the whole thing looked consistent.

  It’s an exciting moment when you hold a playable build of your own game. You’ve already spent hours testing it yourself and you think it’s finally ready to go out there for wider testing. But how do you actually put your game into other people’s hands?

  The beginning of development went surprisingly smoothly. My game concept was simple and well understood, so Codex had no problem getting the project started. It created the basic structure in Godot , set up a playable scene and implemented the core rules. Very quickly, I had something resembling the main gameplay screen where I could move balls around the board and see whether the basic mechanics actually worked.

In this series of posts , I am sharing my experience creating a game from absolute zero as a non-developer and non-designer. In the introductory post , I covered why I picked a game for this experiment. Today, we'll go through the first steps of the process: selecting and setting up the key tools.

My blog's stats are clear: people are interested in practical experiences. Especially when it comes to AI and vibe coding tools. Luckily, that's what I've been doing these past few months - heavily using AI to create a digital product end-to-end. This series will get into all the fancy and stinky details of my process, challenges I've encountered along the way and, of course, the final result accompanied by the cost breakdown.

  Like it or not, lots of people are trying vibe coding. App Store and Google Play are flooded with new apps and games. Product Hunt launches, and domain sales are rising. But is any of it good? And does it matter?

  Nir Eyal’s Hooked made a huge impression on me. It shaped a large part of how I think about product creation. Not because I wanted to “hook” users at any cost, but because the book made one thing very clear: if you understand how to influence behaviour, you also become responsible for how you use that power.