It works... on my computer

Welcome to the studio

You've just joined Kai and Remy's game studio as its newest teammate. Welcome aboard.

Before you arrived, Kai and Remy made two games: Hyper Shards and Garden Defense. Their friends play them and keep asking for one more round. But the games aren't ready for real players yet, and Kai and Remy need your help turning them into real, finished games.

That's what this course is about: taking the studio from a messy start to a real business, one stage at a time.

Bolt says: I'm Bolt, the studio robot. I'll show up with tips along the way.

How the games were made

Kai and Remy didn't write the code line by line. They described each game to an AI in plain words, like "a space shooter where waves of aliens fly down and you blast them". The AI wrote the code, they played it, then asked for changes: "make the ship faster", "add a shop".

This is called vibe coding: building software by describing the result you want and running the code an AI writes, mostly without reading it. AI researcher Andrej Karpathy gave it that name in early 2025.

Game 1: Hyper Shards

A space shooter. You pilot a small ship, dodge enemy fire and blast waves of alien ships.

The plan: smooth controls and big effects, then release it on our own website as a PWA (progressive web app), a web game that players can install like an app. It will earn money as a premium game: players pay once and own it.

Game 2: Garden Defense

A defense game. Waves of pests march into the garden, and you place plants to protect it and its sprout hero, Sprig.

The plan: a phone app on Google Play and the Apple App Store. It will be free to play and earn money from fair ads. The fairest kind is a rewarded ad: the player chooses to watch it in exchange for a bonus, like extra seeds.

Vibe coding: the honest picture

• Fast ideasA playable idea in an afternoon instead of weeks. Perfect for finding out what's fun.
• Anyone can startYou don't need years of practice to build a first version.
• Nobody knows the codeIf no one has read it, no one can safely fix it or grow it.
• Safety never checkedSaves, scores and player data were never designed to be protected.

Vibe coding is a real, useful tool. It also has real limits.

Bolt says: Professional studios use AI every day too. The difference is that they plan, read and test what it writes.

A prototype, not a product

A prototype is a quick first version built to answer one question: is this fun? Both games passed that test, and that's the hardest part. Plenty of ideas never do.

A product is different. It has to run on thousands of different devices, survive months of updates, keep every player's progress safe and earn enough to pay its costs.

Developers have a famous joke about the gap between the two: "it works on my computer".

Our disaster list

• Only on one computerNo web address, no store page, and no way for players to get it or pay for it.
• One giant fileThousands of lines, where every change can break something else.
• Copies, not versionsgame_FINAL_v3.js and friends. Nobody knows which one works.
• Saves that vanishProgress lives in one browser. It can be lost, or edited by cheaters.

Here's what the studio is up against. This stage is about seeing each problem clearly. The later stages fix them.

Bolt says: This is the red part of the map: chaos. Next lesson, we open the giant file.