Design. Code. Ship. — Building an Online Game

Choose Your Game

Pick whichever game excites you most — duplicates are totally fine. Two kids building the same genre will end up with wildly different games, and comparing them is half the fun. One rule for everyone: your game must run as a simple web page, because at the end of Week 2 it goes live on theexperiment.club. Click any card to learn more.

What "Online Game" Means Here Your game will be playable online by anyone with the link — that's the "online" part. It does NOT mean multiplayer-over-the-internet (that needs servers, accounts, and a lot of headaches). Single player, or two players sharing one keyboard, is the sweet spot. High scores can live in the browser with localStorage.

Your Stack

"Stack" is what builders call their set of tools. Yours is the same one professionals use — just pointed at a two-week game instead of a billion-dollar app.

⚡ The Three Rules of Vibe Coding

Vibe coding means describing what you want and letting AI write the code. It feels like a superpower — and it is — but the kids who get great results all follow the same three rules:

1.Commit before every AI session. The AI WILL eventually break your game. A commit is a save point — when things go wrong, you travel back in time instead of starting over.

2.One change per prompt. "Make the jump floatier" works. "Add three enemies, a shop, lava, and multiplayer" produces soup. Small asks, test after each one, commit what works.

3.Read the code. You don't have to write it, but you should be able to follow it. Ask Claude to explain any part you don't understand — "explain this like I'm 13" is a legitimate prompt.

Git Cheat Sheet

Eight commands cover 95% of real life. Tape this to your wall — or ask Claude to quiz you on them until they're muscle memory.

Speak the Language

Eight words that make you sound like (and think like) someone who ships software.

Week 1 — Build It

Five days to go from "I've never used git" to "people are playing my game." The week ends with the Friday Playtest — kids show their games to each other and to parents, and walk away with real feedback, no mercy.

Week 2 — Ship It

You have a pile of feedback and five days. Welcome to real product development: deciding what to fix, what to add, and — hardest of all — what to ignore. The week ends with your game live on the internet.

Saturday: Launch Day 🚀

The games are live at theexperiment.club. Today is the victory lap — demos, awards, and sending the link to everyone you know.

Launch Certification

Nintendo, PlayStation, and Xbox put every game through "certification" before it ships — a checklist the game must pass, no exceptions. This is yours. Pass every item and your game goes live on theexperiment.club. Your checkmarks are saved in this browser.

How Deployment Works theexperiment.club is a static website — it serves plain HTML, CSS, and JavaScript files, nothing else. When you pass certification and add the club host to your GitHub repo, your game folder gets copied to theexperiment.club/games/yourgamename/ and goes live — so pick a great one-word name for your game (lowercase, no spaces: skyfall, cookieclash, maze9). That's why the checklist below matters: if your game follows it, deploying takes minutes. If it doesn't, it can't ship.

🤖 Give the Checklist to Claude — On Day 1

Don't save this checklist for the end — make your AI follow it from the very first prompt. Code that's born legal never needs a lawyer.

1.Copy the prompt with the button below — it's this whole checklist, rewritten as instructions for an AI.

2.Paste it into Claude before your first line of code and ask Claude to remember it for the whole project (if you're using a Claude Project, paste it into the project's instructions — that's permanent memory).

3.On Day 9, say "launch audit" — Claude will check your code against every rule. Then verify the boxes below yourself: trust, but verify.

Discussion Questions

Questions to chew on during the two weeks — and to fuel the Friday playtest and Launch Day conversations. Not every question needs an answer.