Free to play here: https://vengeful180-dot.github.io/Need4Space/

Mechanics are still evolving, and mobile performance is a work in progress.

Your feedback matters. It will shape where the game goes next.

i see a lot of people starting to build mobile apps with ai, many of them non-technical. so i decided to write the general path i’d follow if i was starting today.

who am i to tell you guys: i started building mobile apps in 2009 as an agency in Ukraine, and later built our own portfolio of apps. more than 100 apps released, about 6m organic downloads, company called popappfactory (closed now, some apps are still live).

tl;dr: pick the idea carefully, validate it with a quick web prototype in 1-2 weeks, map your app flow by flow, write a prd [specification], rebuild it native one flow at a time, test with 5-7 real people, release fast.

1. define exactly what you are building

most people pick ideas in one of two ways.

• your own pain. you know the problem, you build for it. fantastic if you have this, go for it. but you still need to invest a lot to validate it: show it to people, polish, improve. this is the innovation path, and it’s harder.
• a category someone else already validated. pick a category you like, study all the competitors, and find the angle where you can be much better: your insight, your approach, maybe ai. the big plus is that the demand is already proven. you see the pricing, the reviews, what people complain about. you spend much less time validating.

both work, the choice is yours. just be honest about what your angle is.

2. build a fast prototype and validate (1–2 weeks)

my approach: give the prototype two days, then spend a week with real users.

the fastest path today is a mobile web version of your app. use whatever you already pay for, usualy people use: lovable, replit, claude. the tool doesn’t matter much here. what matters is quick feedback: is the idea interesting, does the design and workflow make sense, which features to include and which to drop.

it usually takes a week or two, depending on how easily you can talk to your target users. some people also run a questionnaire. i know a founder who got more than 100 replies to hers for a period tracker, a very crowded category, and she still found her angle.

and keep in mind: in most cases you’ll change direction a lot, or even drop the idea and take another one. that’s why steps 1 and 2 matter so much. you want to learn this before you invest in a real mobile app. because building mobile app is not one day work.

3. decide if you need a real mobile app

once your mobile web version works with real users, you have two ways:

• keep developing the web version and see how it goes. sometimes it’s good enough. dont build mobile app if you app fine in web!
• if your idea needs a real app installed on the phone, you have options:
  • a wrapper (capacitor, despia). fast, but in my opinion a temporary fast solution.
  • react native. before AI era, was best option. and you find there are many AI builders for it.
  • fully native, swift and kotlin. this is where the market is moving. the best solution. however bit more complex but worth it.

why market is moving to native - because cost of development dropped so much with ai that full native instead of luxyry solution which required 2 app devs now available for non tech person to build.

the bad news here: you’ll probably need to fully rebuild.

the good news: a rebuild is much easier than your first build, because now you know exactly what to build and which features matter.

4. map your app flow by flow

before any code, draw how the app looks on mobile, on paper or a whiteboard. what’s different from the web version? this visualisation will give you full picture and for me as visual thinker that was really crucial.

split everything into flows [as example]:

• onboarding
• registration
• monetization
• core product (usually several flows inside)

describe and sketch every flow, using screenshots from your web version as reference. then add what’s specific to mobile: notifications, widgets, camera, whatever your app needs.

nowadays i got inspiration on sites like mobbin - you can see how these flows builds in other apps.

5. write your prd

as a pm, i love specs so - write next your product requirements document: the specification of what you’re building, flow by flow. this is what you’ll give the ai for context. i use claude to write together.

6. choose a builder

there are many tools. three things i’d check while selecting:

1. pricing model. pick tools where you plug in your own ai agent, not ones that charge you per credit. you’ll keep maintaining the app, and you don’t want to pay credits forever. the cheapest option that works is usually the best one. because this is a long play for you.
2. code ownership. some tools don’t let you take your code unless you pay for an expensive plan, at least for a month. check this before you start. you should be always take your code for free.
3. how it feels to you. try it and see if you’re comfortable building inside it. at the end of day we choose what is best for us personally.

i advocate for native, swift and kotlin. if your app needs both ios and android, choose a tool that gives you both platforms, preferably in native languages.

7. build flow by flow

usual approach is to build your app flow by flow. write a separate spec for each flow, attach screenshots from your web version or mobbin as reference, and rebuild one flow at a time. don’t ask for the whole app in one prompt.

realistic timeline for an average-size app: a week or two of active work. i’ve done it myself. with a full-time job it can take a month or two, and that’s totally fine, most people build a few hours a day.

expect around 30% of your time to go into debugging and checking that everything works.

8. test and release

• register your apple developer account ($99 a year) and send builds to testers with testflight.
• i usually test with 5–7 people before any release and ask each of them for feedback.
• no audience to test with? you can release a free app and learn from real users in the app store.
• pricing is optional at the start. some people release free first and add pricing later.

the faster you release, the better. build feature by feature, and ship.

hope this helps. happy to answer questions in the comments.

disclosure, i’m one of the founders of modaal, an ai app builder for full native ios and android apps: swift and kotlin, not react native or a webview, both platforms from one project, on your own claude or cursor subscription, free plan for one project. while building modaal i also build my own apps there, it is fun!

Play it here, free in your browser, on a computer (keyboard and mouse): https://birds-with-guns.vercel.app

Press PLAY ONLINE and you're in an 8 v 8 Domination match within seconds. Real players take the seats; bots fill the rest, so it always starts instantly. PLAY VS BOTS is there for offline.

The humans are gone and the jungle took the city. Two flocks, the Talon Republic and the Corvid Syndicate, fight over it with rifles, miniguns and rocket pods. Ten birds: a Sparrow with a rifle, a Pelican with a shoulder minigun, a sniper Owl with a rail gun strapped to its head, a Shoebill with rockets, a Harpy Eagle with a cannon in its talons. You run, dash, and fly. You earn Battle Points in the match (kills, assists, flag captures) and spend them on a heavier bird for one life. Six maps, from a sunset harbour to a neon night market. Birds die in a burst of feathers and a squawk, and the kill feed says things like "Pip caught a worm named Cassius".

I'm a former personal trainer turned indie dev. I don't write any of the code myself; I direct, playtest and make the calls.

The process

1. Grey boxes first. Capsule birds on a box city, 20 v 20 bots, three objectives. My first notes: too many birds to read, flight too twitchy. Next version: smaller teams (it's 8 v 8 now), momentum flight with a dash, aim assist, a minimap.
2. Meshy for the birds. One rigged Sparrow first to prove the pipeline, then all ten birds, then nine guns, then walking clips for every bird so strafing plants real footsteps instead of sliding. That last one came from me sending a clip with the note "the characters just slide".
3. Blender for the city. A scripted map kit (recessed windows, bay windows, tong lau colonnades, air conditioners, neon signs), then six maps, each built by a separate AI agent from one written brief and checked by bots-only matches (flag flips, kills, how often a bot gets stuck) before I ever saw them.
4. Trees that took over the city. Banyans through the asphalt, roots down facades. They block bullets.
5. ElevenLabs for sound. Announcer, barks, music, every gun. My notes were "sounds are way too loud", "that smoke detector beep when a flag is being capped gots to go" and "too much comms". Each was fixed the same night.
6. Make it funny. Feather bursts, pun kill feed, a taunt key, bot trash talk, dry announcer lines ("Somebody get that bird a mop.").
7. Balance from my notes. "Most short range birds suck, the free tank is too tanky." Claude modelled time-to-kill for every gun at every range, added damage falloff, buffed the close-range birds and nerfed the Pelican, then re-ran bot matches.
8. Multiplayer in one night. The game logic was split out of the browser so a server can run it (the same code runs in your browser to predict your own bird), then an authoritative server, lag compensation and a latency simulator. I went to bed; agents built and tested it. In the test, shots on a strafing bird hit 100% at 150 ms of lag (23% without the lag fix), and a full 16-player room costs the server about 4% of one CPU core.

How the AI side was set up

• One main Claude Code session (Opus) as lead: specs, reviewing every change, testing in a browser, merging and deploying.
• The big pieces went to parallel Claude agents (Sonnet), each in its own copy of the repo: six maps, lobby and XP, menus, the comedy pass, the deploy screen, multiplayer, phone controls, the trailer.
• Everything was checked by bots playing it before I played it. A heartbeat job restarted agents that stalled overnight.
• Design docs and decisions live in my Obsidian vault.
• It went wrong too: a test agent force-closed every Edge window on my PC at 3 am, and an early phone version sent players in a loop back to the menu. I found out by playing it.

Tools

Costs (for this game only)

By the numbers: 67 commits in about 2 days (first commit Oct 16, 1:47 pm), about 12,000 lines of game JavaScript, 4,000 more for the server and tools, 10,000 lines of Python for the map kit and tools, six maps, ten birds, 43 MB to first load, 16 players per match. Less than 24 hours from start to post

What I'd tell another vibecoder

• Record yourself playing and send the clip with one blunt sentence. "The characters just slide" got me real footsteps.
• Let agents build in parallel, but keep one lead session that reviews and tests everything before it merges.
• Check content with bots before you play it. Every map arrived with numbers.
• Ship the simple version first. I built phone controls, then admitted the game plays best on a computer, and said so on the title screen.

Tell me which bird you main and what killed you.

Adobe recently released the relight feature, tbh it looks cool, the problem is - it's consuming AI credits. As someone who owns a GPU - it seemed ridiculous, so I added this feature to Photon, My free photoshop alternative.

Another experiment with img2pixi2D!

The workflow was pretty simple:

1. Generated a 2D platformer level image using ChatGPT.
2. Used the img2pixi2D skill to turn it into a playable game with animations, physics, enemies, and visual effects.
3. Did some final polishing on the UI and fixed a few issues along the way.

That's it! From a single image to a playable 2D platformer.

Still experimenting with how far this workflow can go!

🔓 Open source: https://github.com/img2threejs/pixi2d

What do you think?

Good Morning r/vibecoding!

I'm Joey, the developer of Miniskyline! The site lets anybody select an area on a selection of planets/bodies and produce a clean, multicolor 3D printable output.

It was coded ENTIRELY with AI, the vast majority of that being on Claude Code.

How did I launch? I launched expecting it to stay small and a hobby project, but here I am four months later. Snapmaker has provided me with money due to winning in the Innovation Fund, and I have over 2000 daily unique users with over 300,000 generations since launching! I expect a few hundred a YEAR, not an hour, but here we are. It started as me rendering users requested tiles and the file being sent. Now users are treated as thick clients and they render the tiles themselves!

How did I get users? Posts on reddit as well as a lucky break when the main long standing site in this niche was taken down. They re-directed to me as their top option and it has picked up ever since. A youtuber, Uncle Jessy, worked with me and made a video that did excellent in the 3D printing space and brought over 20,000 people in just 2 days to the site.

How do I pay for it? The site is hosted via static pages on Cloudflare. I typically have less than $50/month in fees. MY largest cost is AI, which I use 3 20x plans. The donations I receive have largely paid for my development, andthe Snapmaker fund will continue covering expenses for a few more months while I get income to be steadier.

How much time did it take? All of it. Every moment I wasnt at my job, I was working on the site. AI cant just spit out something this complex in one shot. Hundreds of issue reports, hundreds of feature requests and ideas all get handled within a few hours of receipt. It is time consuming, but getting to work with the people using the site has been my favorite part.

What can you do on the site?

- Print anywhere on Earth, the moon, mars, mercury, vesta, ceres and venus!

- Changes literally hundreds of settings to tweak it to your liking

- Full 3D modelling toolkit built in so you dont have to mess around in slicer to change how something looks.

- Full multicolor support for AMS style and toolchanger style printers

- Print to puzzle, keychain and or multi tile splits!

- Over 3500 landmarks have been modelled and added to the site.

- Rigorous testing to ensure there is little to no non manifold geometry in your exports

- Extremely attention to maintaining small file sizes to allow slicers to work with your tiles more easily.

- Commercial rights ship with each bundle. You dont need a commercial license.

- Print a frame with text either as part of the model, or print the frame separate and use mechanical connections to tie it all together!

- A lot, lot more. Over 78 updates since launch. Nearly 60 hours a week working on the site outside of my career, there is a lot to do!

I hope you all enjoy! Let me know if you have any questions on development processes.

We tested one developer tool: 18 questions its buyers ask, on ChatGPT and Perplexity. AI read its site 381 times that month and named it in 0 answers. Its main competitor got named in 15.

Here’s what we learned about how AI picks what to recommend:

1. Find the sources. Ask your buyers’ questions and write down which pages get cited. It’s almost never your own site. It’s listicles, directories, review sites and Reddit.

2. Be quotable. A one-line “X is a [category] for [who]” at the top of your site, public pricing, and “you vs competitor” pages.

3. Get on those pages. This is the whole difference between 0 and 15. The competitor was on the pages AI trusts and the tool wasn’t.

4. Same facts everywhere. Mixed pricing or a different category on different sites makes AI hedge or leave you out.

5. Check weekly. Ask each question several times, because answers vary between runs. Perplexity reflects changes fastest.

What doesn’t work: keyword stuffing for AI, fake reviews, spamming Reddit.

Happy to share the question list we used if anyone wants to test their own product.

nullplayer.fyi

r/nullPlayer

It seems vibecoding's most profitable use case is creating custom workplace tools. Has anyone vibecoded a tool that saves their company massive time or money? If so can you share?

I wanted to know if anyone is doing mobile apps with ai assisted coding.

Web apps - yes lot of vibe code apps are getting deployed with proper testing and debugging.

Would be interesting to see how many of you are actually vibe coding mobile apps - android/ios

And if you’re doing mobile apps, what tools are you using to debug and testing? I recently came across an open source tool “Measure” that seems good for ai assisted debugging but I wanted to understand what others are using.

I noticed she was tracking all her daily expenses in notes , as all existing budget app are paid or free-tier have ads , she hates ad. So noted here requirements and built this :

Completely local

No ads , No login , No cloud sync

All data stays in local store

That allows us to enable sms read, so can auto sync all transactions sms

Just review and done

Love the age of personalised software

https://rozly.in/

AI Browser Game Jam 5 is officially underway. Submissions are open now through October 30.

This round’s theme: TORCH

A torch in the dark. A torch song. Carrying a torch for someone. Passing the torch. Or just torching the whole thing down. Interpret it however you want or ignore it entirely, the theme is a suggestion, not a rule.

The rules are simple: make a free browser-playable game in two weeks using AI for whatever you want. Code, art, music, design, sound, anything.

A few details:

• No sponsor or required AI service
• Solo devs or teams
• Theme is optional
• Sharing your AI workflow/process is encouraged
• Participants play and rate the entries

The last jam had 126 entries and 248 people joined, so I’m really curious how big round 5 gets.

Jam page: https://itch.io/jam/ai-jam-5
Discord: https://discord.gg/86xBnZqHjy

If you joined one of the previous jams, feel free to share what you made and what tools you used. Thanks for reading and have a nice day.

Hi folks, I posted the bubblegum pop music video a few days back and I wanted to take another crack at it and try to have Claude make something in an entirely different style than what most Claude-made music videos are doing right now.

I've seen a lot of folks make videos with Claude that are lyrics heavy with motion graphics, like the last video I made. However I don't think I've seen anyone attempt traditional-looking animation and wanted to see if I could make it work.

This took a bit longer than the other one, and had a lot more back and forth but in a nutshell:

• Every shot is a 2D cut-out "puppet" written as code and drawn as SVG: his face, his hands, the bed, the car, the blinds.
• The colored-pencil-on-black-paper look comes from procedural hatching and paper-grain filters. It's animated "on twos" (12 drawings a second) like traditional 2D animation, with the pencil lines boiling in every frame.
• The main character is built from a model sheet in head units, so he stays on-model from every angle.
• It was rendered with Remotion in React, after many rounds of back and forth where I told Claude exactly what I wanted.

What Claude struggled with most was hands and perspective. On the first few tries, the hands came out mangled and wrong. What finally worked was having it look up real references (including photos of my own hands) and explaining in detail how hands work: how they're built, what they look like, and how they move. After five or six rounds of that, the hands finally looked right.

The song was generated in about 30 rounds with Suno, from a lyrics draft I wrote and then shaped into something actually decent with Claude's help.

For the meaning, I've always felt AI can be weaponized to prey on our deepest emotions and desires, and I'd argue addiction to the next token is a real thing. Loneliness can really mess you up, and there are corporations and bad actors more than willing to make a quick buck off it through AI companions. This video tells the story of one lonely person getting exploited this way, but I'm sure it's happening to real people right now.

Also, just for clarity: I'm a musician myself and have written and produced songs in various DAWs over the years, so I know what goes into producing a song like this. However, this is kind of my first foray into AI music, and I gotta say, the speed at which you can iterate is truly bananas. I'm still a bit conflicted on what actually counts as "art" here, but never before have I been able to see the style, vibe and emotions I was going for come together so quickly. This took me about five days. In the past, the song alone would have taken me two weeks to a month, minimum.

There's a higher quality version of this on Youtube if you want to watch it there: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aAYCod9gMck

I keep seeing people say things like "vibe coders don't understand what's going on in their code." Neither did most programmers even before the pre-AI era. They spent weeks on sprints for small feature updates hoping and praying nothing broke and relied on the 1 guy who wrote some code in 1995 who showed up at the office once every 3 months in his slippers to do bug fixes.

With the news that F1 is coming to Rwanda in the 2030s, I wanted to share a side project I completed in 3 days.

a racing sim that runs in your browser, on a fan-made Rwanda circuit. It’s not the official layout (that hasn’t been built yet), just a fan take from the official renders. Works on PC with a keyboard, controller or wheel.

This mod is basically WorldEdit but with AI : First off you select your region (by picking two corners or just by looking where you want your structure to be), then you prompt in a chat command. That prompt is sent to the agent along with the selected region, who has a simulation to work in, then the agent work in the background then deliver its result and you get a reconstitution of what it did.

You can even use books in lecterns to give additional spatial context.

It is incredibly good at following precise instructions, so I think it can be more than just something to toy with and may be an actual reliable tool for builders who want to complete side-stuff.

The way it works is that the mod is calling a separate program running on the system (called the "core") which handles connecting to your Claude or Codex CLI, you even have a nice UI to configure everything from it (what AI provider, what model, effort etc).

The mod is purely server-side, so you can even toy with it in multiplayer and your friends don't need to install anything as long as the host have it.

Vibe-coded with GPT-6 Astra when it was still good, then I pivoted to Claude Opus 5.5, I still took some decisions for the overall architecture and API tho. I also care about having something clean, shareable and that doesn't feel janky. The design and ideas are from me.

Despite having to install two things to install to make it work (the Core program and the mod itself) I hope it's easy enough to pick up.

Fully open-source and forkable : https://github.com/Ni-Cobra/worldprompt

Showcase video : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1TMD-y_XeXk

Powered by webgpu. See it live: https://grimoire.bio

I love fish and I keep a little tank right on my desk. The problem is I’m pretty lazy about looking after it, so my fish usually don’t last long before they “move” to the tree out back 👀

So I made a fish game instead. In KoiFocus you can:

• Feed your fish and clean your pond
• Buy new kinds of fish and decorations
• Visit other people’s ponds

The twist: you earn coins by focusing. Every minute you focus = 1 coin. Focus for 30 minutes and you can buy a Wild Guppy.

You can also invite friends to focus together as a group. All your progress is saved and synced in real time.

It’s a simple game, but it’s really chill and it actually keeps me motivated. It runs right in your browser, nothing to download.

Try it here: https://koifocus.com