You learn what AI can do by building with it. So the summer Hotly bet on games, I played my way through six browser games - and they turned out to be the first frontend code I ever wrote.
Play the games →Five of them, hosted exactly as they were built. No install, they run in the browser.- June to September 2025
- Hotly’s games era: a prompt-to-game platform, then creator game tournaments
- All six games, the design docs, the tuning, the second plugin conversion
- Converted the first plugin into the product, and showed me how
- Six playable games, two shipped into the product - and frontend became my skill
Every idea went straight to a playable build: single HTML files, vibe-coded solo, tuned by playing them until the numbers felt right. I was learning two things at once - what the AI tools could actually carry, and how frontend works, by watching them write it and arguing back. The story below runs oldest to newest, and that order matters: you can watch the games get better as I learn.
Where it started
June 2025, month one. Tweet Defender got the full treatment: I wrote the design docs first - a 30-day political survival campaign, a sabotage-economy spec with pseudocode, a test plan, five endings from Power Couple to Mutual Destruction. Then I built it four times with four different AI tools - Cursor twice, Gemini, Windsurf - same brief, to see which one could actually carry the design. The builds were rough. The learning was the point.
The same month produced Hack Elon’s Password: an escalating-rules puzzle with three leaked-hint chapters, an embarrassment meter, and a separate build just for phones. Goofy on purpose; the rule engine underneath was real.
The games got good
By August the training wheels were off. Piano Tiles was the first build good enough to ship: a week of commits from "last working version before removing" to a clean rebuild, tuned until the perfect-hit logic felt fair. It crossed into hotly.gg as a production plugin, and creators ran Piano Tiles tournaments around it.
September was the velocity month. A click-to-place Tetris took one day and two commits, the second one titled "sorry html file now". And the last game was the best one.
It shipped too - the demo video hotly.gg serves is byte-for-byte the one recorded from the prototype. Converting the two into production plugins was its own lesson: Bhavneet did the first and showed me how; the second I did myself.
Hotly eventually aimed itself at Penpal, and the games phase wound down. But the games did their real job: the frontend I first learned tuning tile physics and tractor beams is the same frontend I have written extensively since - Hotly’s landing pages, and every page of this site.
one commit message is just an apology in hindi. it was that kind of summer.