Fellow Lemmite cat lovers, I'm vibecoding a bunch of games about cats. All free to play, no trackers, no money, all just for fun. Enjoy! (99catgames.neocities.org)

submitted 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago) by catgames@retrolemmy.com to c/cat@lemmy.world

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If you play any and have feedback, please let me know!

https://99catgames.neocities.org/

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[-] catgames@retrolemmy.com 12 points 1 day ago

Yeah, 100% vibe coded. I have zero coding experience, it's mostly just a learning experience for me.

Which ones aren't enjoyable to you? Just curious.

[-] donuts@lemmy.world 14 points 1 day ago* (last edited 1 day ago)

I get it and I commend you for that. The thing is, that consistency, feel and flow is what makes a game look and feel good.

Here's some specifics:

Cat's Eye Chaos: camera goes way too fast, can't really track the ball at times. Also, because the ball can go up so high, you don't know whether you're picking up power ups correctly which can lead to frustration. I also didn't know that the yellow bars were flippers, but I could have gleaned that from the instructions.
Cardboard Castle Builder: the goal is confusing and it doesn't seem very clear on how to "win", but I do love the idea, together with the cat checking it out before getting a score.
Oracle Cats: this seems to be just 8ball questions and answers? I can't really call this a game, but that doesn't mean it's bad.

Considering you're doing this as a learning experience, I don't want to be too harsh though. I just wanted to point out that while technically it's a game, it lacks that feeling of elements working nearly together to make a fun experience.

I don't think you're going to get more out of GenAI though, so I can't really give you any feedback other than try to do it without AI. But that's probably not very fair, I can't even program myself so that sounds hypocritical

Edit: hypocritical

[-] MyNameIsRichard@lemmy.ml 3 points 1 day ago

so I can’t really give you any feedback other than try to do it without AI

That's where the real fun and satisfaction lies. It is harder and takes longer though.

[-] catgames@retrolemmy.com 6 points 1 day ago

Thanks, and all fair points. My own relief at being "done" is probably a contributing factor adding to my own enjoyment anyway, so an outside perspective helps.

And yes, the Oracle Cats one is just a magic 8 ball. It was a random idea that popped into my head.

[-] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 8 points 1 day ago

Actually, what do you learned after all this? I never heard of vibe code until yesterday, i wonder what the experience of using one is about.

[-] catgames@retrolemmy.com 1 points 21 hours ago

Well, first off I learned that I should never share this ever again on Lemmy. I naively thought that what has actually been a lot of work was possibly be worth 30 seconds of fun to someone somewhere...nope. Literally nothing but hate here. I've had much less harsh and generally not-negative comments elsewhere, and as a lemmy user on another instance, it was pretty surprising.

As for coding, I've learned quite a bit about using Claude Code in VS studio, which is something that I hadn't touched a couple months ago. My coding experience prior to this was being a Linux user, some stats program stuff, and some light HTML, so it's been a lot of learning about javascript and CSS. I also learned that now it's a pretty short line between an idea and getting something coded that actually works. So if I want to mock-up a site or app or browser extension just for me, that's not hard to do.

I also learned just how much charlatanism there is in the AI/coding space. Even just for gaming or just for small sub-sets of use. Tons of people are trying to be one rung up the ladder and sell subscriptions to some AI system that does it all - trying to follow the adage to sell shovels during a gold rush, not dig for gold. So it's very easy to just get consumed by $20 a month subscriptions to 200 things promising everything and anything. Though, it doesn't seem like many people are going for those things, at least not enough to keep all these people afloat long term.

There's also a ton of people out there trying to do the same thing. Once a week someone on reddit posts their site where they want to be some hub for community and resources, and every time no one wants to jump on board. I'm not a coder, I'm an economic analyst - so it gave me great insight into the part of the AI bubble that might actually pop first. AI infrastructure investment and sunk costs (oh, those are "investments!") by larger companies will keep a lot of bigger entities going, so the bubble that affects normal people and small businesses is where the real danger is for large-scale shifts in the economy.

So the real lessons learned were about the non-friends I made along the way.

[-] psx_crab@lemmy.zip 2 points 18 hours ago

Thanks for the insight. I actually did learn coding the "easy" way back when i start learning to make game for fun. I think back then even drag & drop system like used in GameMaker got a lot of hate, so i do know what its like. I heard from people when i first learned about vibe coding is that it's amazing for end user to whip something out very easily, and they argued that as long as it's for really small project and personal use it's pretty great, else it would be a nightmare to update/maintain/make small change because of the uncommented spaghetti code. Tbh, that sounds fair. Though i'm pretty curious on how well people can learn coding this way.