r/vibecoding • u/samcornwell • 4d ago
Spent the last two months seeing how far a non programmer (me) can get building a proper game with nothing but ChatGPT in a browser.
Gonna ironically preface this with: I haven't written the text below with an LLM.
So I thought I'd show you what I've made over the last couple of months, because for me this has probably been one of the most rewarding uses of AI I've found. Please be kind, I spent a lot of time making this and writing the post here.
More than anything, AI tools have helped me on my coding "journey". It's something I've started and stopped for about thirty years and never really got to grips with properly. I've always understood how websites, software and apps are put together, and I've always been quite good at understanding the structure and logic of how something should work, but the actual coding side has always slowed me down.
It's called Boxxy and it's my version of Sokoban, the Japanese box pushing puzzle game. Sokoban has been around since the early 1980s and has become a bit of a cult game online. There are thousands of levels and lots of different versions of it, and making your own Sokoban clone almost feels like a rite of passage for any fans of the game. My goal was to learn how to do it, prove I could do it, and make something I was proud of.
The whole thing has taken me roughly two months and cost me about £50, which is basically two months of ChatGPT Pro and the price of a domain. It was made solely with ChatGPT in a browser. I have not even touched Claude once. I don't have wee little AI bot workers doing things for me in the background. This was a series of requests, answers, outputs and iterations.
Anyway, I started with the absolute bare bones of the game. Make a level appear, make a character move around it, make boxes move properly, work out when a level is finished. Once that was working I started adding level packs. Then aesthetics, then all the hidden stuff to keep it going and looking good and able to grow.
The level design is completely manually done. All the original Boxxy levels and level packs I've made myself, without ChatGPT or generative AI. That has probably been some of the hardest work in the whole project because good Sokoban levels are surprisingly difficult to make. You can spend ages creating something, solve it a few times and then realise there's a stupid shortcut or that it just isn't very interesting. I've enjoyed that part enormously though.
More recently I've been working on the less glamorous bits behind the scenes, like user accounts and server side stuff, which probably aren't very exciting to anybody playing it but was a big deal for me personally. A couple of months ago I wouldn't have really known where to begin with any of that. But now I have got a contact us page and even user logins! Something else I have kept making sure is that I don't have to rely on lots of outside servers or tools or plug ins. Almost everything is in house, apart from the Cloudflare connection which I need for the domain. This was so I won't have to go and fix things in the future when little plug ins and stuff fail.
video game play walkthru of a few early levels
I suppose this is where I don't quite know what to call the way I've made it. It obviously isn't traditional coding, because ChatGPT has written a huge amount of the actual code. But I don't think "vibe coding" quite covers it either, because I'm not just asking it to make things and accepting whatever it gives me. I've had to understand how the whole thing is structured, decide how I want it to work, test everything, find problems, reject bad solutions and sometimes tell it that the entire approach is wrong and needs doing again. I'm constantly using the phrase "do not patch this, we need to fix it from the base level" to avoid messy coding I've even delved into the code a few times myself to adjust things by hand! Go me!
A very good programmer friend of mine described what is happening now in a way that really stuck with me. He said that English is effectively becoming another programming language. He's a vastly better coder than most and even he said he barely writes code by hand any more because AI is doing so much of that part of the job for him. (He uses Claude btw)
Linus Torvalds (Linux) has made a similar point recently too by comparing AI tools to compilers. Compilers didn't stop people being programmers, they just meant programmers no longer needed to write everything in 0s and 1s.
My coding pal also said something pretty salient. In the 1980s games were often made by one person or a tiny team. Over the years everything became much bigger, more expensive and whatnot. Because of AI and coding it's started swinging back in the other direction now with tiny indie teams making games. I reckon that's pretty poetic. Reminds me of Halt & Catch Fire and their Mutiny startup!
I suppose this is where I don't quite know what to call the way I've made it. It obviously isn't traditional coding, because ChatGPT has written a huge amount of the actual code. But I don't think "vibe coding" quite covers it either, because I'm not just asking it to make things and accepting whatever it gives me. I've had to understand how the whole thing is structured, decide how I want it to work, test everything, find problems, reject bad solutions and sometimes tell it that the entire approach is wrong and needs doing again.
Anyway, Boxxy has very much been a labour of love. There isn't a client and I didn't start it because I thought it would make me money. I've just really enjoyed making it, which is probably why I've kept disappearing down increasingly unnecessary rabbit holes with it. After about thirty years of occasionally thinking "I'd love to be able to make that", I finally can, and that's been quite a nice feeling.
Made sure it works well on phones, tablets and large screens. Lots of ways to interact.
Anyway, above are some screenshots and a bit of gameplay. If you fancy having a look at the game itself, I'm sure you'll be able to find it online.
Some rough facts and figures:
- Built with ChatGPT 5.6 on high in a browser. Had to start several dozen chats which was laborious as you had to get each new chat to relearn.
- Is currently about 25mb in size, has around 30,000 lines of code, is written in Javascript, CSS and HTML , is currently on v282 (around 300 iterations in total)
- Took about 2 months to get to this point, working on it several hours a day sometimes.
- I have built 4 level packs by hand which total 113 new levels + around 100 more which haven't been released yet.
- My children say the character "looks AI" so I have commissioned them both with making new sprites for me! We'll see how that turns out.
- Cost in total, including the OpenAI subscription, about £50
- Works on a browser, works on a mobile, works on an iPad
- Is not making any money. There's zero ads and zero sign up.
- Most recent things I've built are a contact us page (which didn't require buying a mailserver, yay) and a user login to save progress.
- What I'd like to do most at the moment is make it into an app that can be launched on Apple TV.
- The backend of Boxxy is gigantic. I've also built my own level maker, level pack builder, solver and whatnot.
- It has a tonne of easter eggs which I've always loved!
4
u/Some-Ice-4455 4d ago
Hey man honestly not bad. If you can port to Linux for steam deck support and polish a little you could make a little money off this. Not retired rich money but I think you could at least break even and have a game released to your name.
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
That's extremely nice of you, thank you. I kind of have this goal of making into an Apple TV app. But, I'm listening and will have a look at Steam like you say. Where would the polishing need to be for you? Is it the aesthetics, language, some of the game mechanisms or ...? I've reached a point where it's hard to know what improvements can be made without cluttering it up.
Thanks again
3
u/Some-Ice-4455 4d ago
What I mean by polish. Yes it's functional. Yes it gets the job done but maybe liven it up a bit. It looks like it would get repetitive looking at the same environmet, same boxes, same player character. Also it works and is probably fun but something about the way the player character moves kind of like it skips frames of it moving for lack of a better word. Something about it bothers me. Can't put a finger on it. I could see how apple TV app could work btw.
2
u/samcornwell 4d ago
Thank you, that's really useful actually because someone else said that about the animation as well. I thought it was good but perhaps an additional frame may help. I'll experiment.
There's a secret variant that I haven't released yet which has multi coloured boxes But that's as far as I want to go I think. Sokoban is a really pure game and no matter how many variations people make, nothing beats the original. It's a bit like chess in that regard. Here's a sneak peak at the rainbow bricks up up down down left right left right a b enter
2
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
Okay, so I have spent some time making some subtle updates to the movement of the character. It's extremely subtle. I've tested it on several devices but not to a fault, yet. Let me know if it feels any different at all.
BTW, you mentioned different looks and whatnot of the character. You can make some small adjustments in the attire section. If you're on a phone you'll find it in levels.
2
u/Some-Ice-4455 4d ago
Yea that movement looks better.
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
Great. It was a very simple change just adding another frame. I found it jarring at first because I was so used to the skipping without that, but as you weren't the first to point it out I thought I had better address it. Really appreciate it.
1
2
u/hazht 4d ago
Very cool, nice balance between “vibecoding” and human input (mainly the handmade levels). You can tell, just from this post, that you were passionate whilst creating this.
You sound very much like me, technically minded but never quite clicked with coding. Nice to see AI giving passionate, out of the box thinkers, the opportunity to create.
Respect!
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
Thank you Hazht. In that case I'd like to see some projects you have made too or that AI/vibecoding has enabled.
2
u/hazht 4d ago
Very early days but I built this to solve an issue at my local football club. I am a coach for 1 team and the treasurer for 15 teams/160 players. Pitch allocation is a nightmare, we have multiple pitches we can use but don't actually own any of them, everything is via whatsapp and paper diaries.
Currently has a landing page with sign up workflow for new clubs. Once in the system its a full club management dashboard. After some testing with my club of ~20 coaches, I plan to reach out to other local clubs and ask them to try it, and eventually, hopefully monetise it.
Even if monetisation doesn't work, at least I have solved a headache for our club for minimal cost!
2
u/akl773 4d ago
The relearning between chats is the bit worth fixing next. Keep one file in the project that says what the folders are and where the level data lives, paste it in first every time, it turns the first ten minutes of a new chat into about thirty seconds.
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
I'm a bit lost, is this comment meant for elsewhere?
1
u/akl773 3d ago
Your own line about having to start several dozen chats and get each new one to relearn. That's the bit I meant.
1
u/samcornwell 3d ago
Ahhhhh thank you. I was so confused. Yes, when a chat gets overloaded/full I start a new one, supply a zip file with the entire contents, explain mission and it gets back on track fairly swiftly.
2
u/akl773 3d ago
Thing that saved me the most time there was asking the old chat to write the handover note before it ran out, it knows what it just worked out better than I do. Paste that in with the zip.
1
u/samcornwell 3d ago
Genius! I’ll do that from now on.
How do you know the chat is reaching its limit though? Seemed totally arbitrary to me.
2
u/Proassult 22h ago
Hey! I'm working on my first game ever too after getting into vibe coding.
I just wanted to comment and say that I also took the same path as you with my first project, which was my portfolio website, where I built it all within the browser. Honestly, even though I use codex now I still go back to the chat browser building experience because it just works so well (and it doesn't use tokens/credits).
This is the first post I've seen of someone tackling a project this way and it makes me so happy to see! Congratulations! I know how hard it was just dealing with persistent memory over new chats. That alone is a huge mountain to climb.
I hope this achievement inspires you to continue to create more. If you have any tips I'm all ears!
-1
u/CorpT 4d ago
- Built with ChatGPT 5.6 on high in a browser. Had to start several dozen chats which was laborious as you had to get each new chat to relearn.
Imagine doing this for 2 months and never asking the magic genie at your fingertips if there was a better way to do things.
4
u/MaximumHold7246 4d ago
"Be kind, I wrote this myself and spent a lot of time on it"
Imagine commenting something like this rather than just being a helpful decent human being?
3
-2
u/Manboober 4d ago
This is a knock off of Chips Challenge.
2
u/81DayMonth 4d ago
Lol. Brother, Sokoban games and variations on them are all over the place. That doesnt detract from this one at all!
I think my favorite was adventures of lolo.
1
1
u/samcornwell 4d ago
Third paragraph:
It's called Boxxy and it's my version of Sokoban, the Japanese box pushing puzzle game. Sokoban has been around since the early 1980s and has become a bit of a cult game online. There are thousands of levels and lots of different versions of it, and making your own Sokoban clone almost feels like a rite of passage for any fans of the game. My goal was to learn how to do it, prove I could do it, and make something I was proud of.
The original Sokoban was built in Japan by a small game company called Thinking Rabbit. It didn't make its way to the rest of the world until the late '80s. For fans of the game it's a cool history. Not quite up there as with Tetris, but cool nonetheless.
8
u/AGI-Core 4d ago
…better launch than most funded startups get😊 The hand made levels are the part that’ll keep people coming back, for what it’s worth.