Lessons

23 stages and 358 lessons in 2 courses. Each lesson stands alone.

Course 1

Stage 1: The vibe-coded disaster

Why a game made fast with AI breaks, loses work and gets cheated.

  1. It works... on my computer
  2. The giant file
  3. game_FINAL_v3.js
  4. Saves that vanish
  5. Boss: Spot the disaster

Stage 2: Build a real workshop

Planning, the code editor, AI prompts, the command line and Git.

  1. Planning and teamwork
  2. Antigravity 2.0, our workshop
  3. The command line
  4. Claude Opus 5.5, our AI teammate
  5. So many ways to code
  6. Prompts that work
  7. Claude's helpers: subagents and Remote Control
  8. Permissions: how much can the AI do alone?
  9. Code like LEGO
  10. Debugging: find the bug, don't guess
  11. Git commits: save points
  12. Push, pull, fetch and clone
  13. Branches: try ideas safely
  14. Merge conflicts
  15. Pull requests and code review
  16. Docs and READMEs
  17. Tests: unit and integration
  18. Robot players: end-to-end tests
  19. The robot tester
  20. Boss: Workshop ready

Stage 3: Make it feel great

Game design, movement, art, sound, juice, accessibility and playtesting.

  1. Game design and the core loop
  2. Level design
  3. Story and dialogue
  4. Game math: moving and colliding
  5. Game loops and state machines
  6. Controls that feel fair
  7. Enemy brains and pathfinding
  8. Procedural generation
  9. 60 frames per second
  10. Art, sprites and animation
  11. The asset pipeline
  12. Sound and music
  13. Game feel and juice
  14. Shaders and visual effects
  15. Tutorials and menus
  16. Accessibility
  17. Screen readers and games
  18. Balancing with numbers
  19. Playtesting
  20. Boss: Feels great

Stage 4: Connect to the cloud

Logins, cloud saves, leaderboards and keeping player data safe.

  1. What is a backend?
  2. Requests, APIs and JSON
  3. Designing your data
  4. Firebase logins
  5. Cloud saves
  6. Cross-platform saves and cross-play
  7. Leaderboards
  8. Real-time and multiplayer basics
  9. Multiplayer: who decides what happened?
  10. Concurrency: two things at once
  11. Code on the server
  12. Your own servers: AWS EC2 and Lightsail
  13. Stopping cheaters
  14. Keeping player data safe
  15. Staying safe online: accounts and AI agents
  16. Web security: XSS, headers and HTTPS
  17. Costs and scaling
  18. What AI costs
  19. AI inside the game
  20. Boss: Cloud connected

Stage 5: Make it official

Your company, copyright, licences, trademarks, player agreements and insurance.

  1. Why a company?
  2. Copyright and licenses
  3. Fan games, remixes and derivative works
  4. Open-source code and free assets
  5. EULAs: the player licence
  6. Name, logo and trademarks
  7. Checking what the AI made
  8. Business insurance
  9. Boss: Open for business

Stage 6: Make money

Ways to earn, pricing, payments, ads, sales tax and playing fair with players' money.

  1. Five ways to earn
  2. How paid games pay
  3. How freemium pays
  4. How in-game purchases pay
  5. Battle passes and season passes
  6. Dark patterns: fair or manipulative?
  7. How donations pay
  8. How ads pay
  9. Bank accounts and taxes
  10. Payments with Stripe
  11. Webhooks: how we know they paid
  12. Selling worldwide: currencies and FX
  13. Sales tax and VAT
  14. Refunds, disputes and fraud
  15. Pricing our games
  16. Boss: Money talks

Stage 7: Ship it!

Websites, app stores, Steam, consoles and launch day.

  1. Choose your channel
  2. Early access
  3. Cloudflare and our domain
  4. PWA: install from the web
  5. Web performance: fast to load, smooth to play
  6. Google Play and App Store
  7. Translating the game
  8. Building and signing app releases
  9. QA passes and bug tracking
  10. Piracy and DRM
  11. Steam
  12. Consoles
  13. Testers and review
  14. Launch day and support
  15. Boss: Launch day

Stage 8: Get found

Store pages, trailers, festivals, Discord, short videos and search.

  1. Who is it for? Market research
  2. Go-to-market: the launch plan
  3. A store page that sells
  4. Trailers and screenshots
  5. Demos and game festivals
  6. Pitching journalists
  7. Discord: our community home
  8. Newsletters and mailing lists
  9. TikTok and short videos
  10. Influencers and creators
  11. Paid ads: buying players
  12. Search Console
  13. AEO: be the answer
  14. Ready for AI agents
  15. Boss: Everyone knows

Stage 9: Keep players

Events, updates, rewards and reading the numbers.

  1. What is LiveOps?
  2. Version numbers and patch notes
  3. Public roadmaps
  4. Reading the numbers
  5. Remote Config switches
  6. Seasonal events
  7. Tournaments, esports and wikis
  8. Achievements and rewards
  9. Push notifications
  10. Updates and player feedback
  11. Refactoring and technical debt
  12. When things break: outages, attacks and backups
  13. Boss: They keep coming back

Stage 10: Grow the studio

Unit economics, hiring, publishers, crowdfunding and grants.

  1. Unit economics
  2. Growing the team
  3. Hiring your first teammates
  4. AI for the whole studio: Cowork, Claude Design and Artifacts
  5. Scope, crunch and looking after the team
  6. Product management
  7. Publishers and crowdfunding
  8. Grants
  9. What's next for the studio
  10. Boss: Ready to grow

Stage 11: Investors and exits

Shares, valuation, pitching, term sheets and selling a studio.

  1. Shares and ownership
  2. Voting rights and control
  3. Financials
  4. How studios are valued
  5. Business plans and pitch decks
  6. Raising money
  7. Term sheets
  8. Acquisitions and exits
  9. Final boss: The big decision

Course 2

Stage 1: The big one

Three apps shipped. Now Kai and Remy plan a bigger game, and every guess about it gets tested.

  1. Three apps shipped: what now?
  2. Picking the next game: bets and evidence
  3. The design doc
  4. Technical design docs and RFCs
  5. Architecture decision records
  6. Estimating: why every guess is wrong
  7. Narrow the cone
  8. Publisher or investor?
  9. Publisher deals, line by line
  10. Follow the money
  11. Risks and the risk register
  12. Score the risks
  13. Build, buy or borrow
  14. Outsourcing and who owns the work
  15. Prototype the hard part first
  16. Vertical slices
  17. Milestones: alpha, beta, gold
  18. Requirements that can be tested
  19. Saying no
  20. Boss: Plan the big one

Stage 2: Architecture at scale

Shard Garden needs servers that keep working when a million players show up.

  1. Monoliths, modules and services
  2. An API contract
  3. Versioning an API
  4. REST, GraphQL and RPC
  5. Queues and background jobs
  6. Events and pub/sub
  7. Caching: the hardest easy thing
  8. CDNs and the edge
  9. Database indexes
  10. Find it with an index
  11. Transactions and consistency
  12. Replicas
  13. Sharding
  14. Migrations without downtime
  15. Idempotency and retries
  16. Rate limiting
  17. Pace the requests
  18. Boss: Architecture at scale

Stage 3: Netcode

Friends on four continents play in one garden, and it has to feel like the same room.

  1. Latency, jitter and packet loss
  2. UDP, TCP, WebSockets and WebTransport
  3. Tick rate and snapshots
  4. Client prediction
  5. Feel the round trip
  6. Server reconciliation
  7. Lag compensation
  8. Rollback netcode
  9. Lockstep
  10. Interest management
  11. Matchmaking and skill ratings
  12. Rate a match
  13. Lobbies and sessions
  14. Regions and relays
  15. Testing on bad networks
  16. Boss: Netcode

Stage 4: Make it fast everywhere

LCP, INP and CLS measure what a player feels on a real phone, not on our laptops.

  1. Lab data and field data
  2. LCP: the big thing appears
  3. INP: answering every tap
  4. CLS: nothing jumps
  5. Origin response and TTFB
  6. Cache-Control and revalidation
  7. Compression: gzip, Brotli, zstd
  8. Modern image and texture formats
  9. Code splitting and lazy loading
  10. Fonts without flashes
  11. Frame-time budgets
  12. Profiling CPU and GPU
  13. Memory and garbage collection
  14. Phones: heat and battery
  15. Load testing
  16. Boss: Make it fast

Stage 5: See inside the game

Logs, metrics and traces show what Shard Garden is doing for every player, right now.

  1. What observability is
  2. Structured logs
  3. Log levels, and what never to log
  4. Metrics: counters, gauges, histograms
  5. Percentiles: p50, p95, p99
  6. Find the p90
  7. Traces and spans
  8. Sampling
  9. Dashboards that answer a question
  10. SLIs and SLOs
  11. Error budgets
  12. Alerts that matter
  13. On-call and runbooks
  14. Crash reports and browser errors
  15. Exporting and keeping data
  16. Boss: See inside the game

Stage 6: Ask the data

Events, pipelines and SQL answer what players actually do in Shard Garden.

  1. Event design and naming
  2. An analytics pipeline
  3. Exporting to a warehouse
  4. SQL: SELECT and WHERE
  5. SQL: GROUP BY and JOIN
  6. Funnels
  7. Cohorts and retention curves
  8. A/B tests: the design
  9. A/B tests: the statistics
  10. Lifetime value
  11. Which ad brought them?
  12. Pick a bid
  13. Dashboards for the team
  14. Data quality
  15. Privacy-safe analytics
  16. Predicting churn
  17. Boss: Ask the data

Stage 7: Keep it running

Shipping every day without breaking the garden for the players inside it.

  1. CI/CD pipelines
  2. Environments: dev, staging, production
  3. Infrastructure as code
  4. Containers
  5. Canary releases
  6. Read the canary
  7. Blue-green deploys
  8. Rollbacks
  9. Feature flags at scale
  10. Incident command
  11. Status pages and telling players
  12. Blameless postmortems
  13. Backups: RPO and RTO
  14. How much is lost?
  15. Chaos engineering
  16. Capacity planning
  17. Cloud costs (FinOps)
  18. Boss: Keep it running

Stage 8: Trust and safety

Players build and chat in Shard Garden, so the studio keeps them and their data safe.

  1. Threat modelling
  2. Passkeys
  3. Tokens and sessions
  4. Secrets management
  5. Supply-chain security
  6. Keeping dependencies current
  7. Read the version range
  8. DDoS and bots
  9. Bug bounties and pen tests
  10. Moderating chat
  11. Filter the chat
  12. Reporting and blocking
  13. Safety review for player-made levels
  14. Children's online safety laws
  15. The EU's Digital Services Act
  16. Data requests: access and deletion
  17. AI agents and security reviews
  18. Boss: Trust and safety

Stage 9: Every channel

One game on the web, phones, Steam and consoles, each with its own rules.

  1. A multi-channel strategy
  2. Cross-progression
  3. Porting
  4. Console certification
  5. Age ratings: IARC, ESRB, PEGI
  6. Read the labels
  7. Store algorithms and featuring
  8. Regional pricing
  9. Platform fees compared
  10. What reaches the studio?
  11. Web shops and other payment options
  12. The DMA: paying outside the store in Europe
  13. Subscription catalogues and cloud gaming
  14. PC stores beyond Steam
  15. Tablets, foldables and Chromebooks
  16. Markets with their own rules
  17. Boss: Every channel

Stage 10: Live economy

Shard Garden's coins, seasons and player-made levels, kept fair for years.

  1. Sinks and sources
  2. Balance the coins
  3. Inflation in game economies
  4. Pricing virtual items
  5. Coins on the books: bookings and revenue
  6. Ad mediation and bidding
  7. Loot boxes and the law
  8. Trading and scams
  9. Spot the scam
  10. Level editors and player-made content
  11. Mods and modding communities
  12. Creator programmes
  13. Live events and seasons
  14. Community at scale
  15. Backlash and review bombs
  16. When a game shuts down
  17. Boss: Live economy

Stage 11: AI at scale

AI features that a million players can use safely, fast and within budget.

  1. AI features in production
  2. Evals: testing an AI
  3. Grade the answers
  4. Guardrails
  5. Response time and streaming
  6. Caching AI answers
  7. Prompt versions
  8. Retrieval: giving the AI your docs
  9. A budget per player
  10. Set the budget
  11. Open models and APIs
  12. AI agents across the team
  13. AI and children's safety
  14. Boss: AI at scale

Stage 12: The studio at scale

From two founders to a studio with managers, a board and decisions that last.

  1. Org design
  2. Managers and one-to-ones
  3. Career ladders
  4. Options for the team
  5. Remote and hybrid studios
  6. Forecasts and runway
  7. How long is the runway?
  8. Tax credits for games
  9. Board meetings
  10. When founders disagree
  11. Mergers: joining two studios
  12. Split the merged studio
  13. Who gets what
  14. Selling shares and going public
  15. Layoffs and closures, handled well
  16. Studio culture
  17. The game as a franchise
  18. What lasts
  19. Boss: The studio at scale