Your First Game in 10 Minutes.
Build a real, playable game right now. No experience needed.
After this lesson you'll know
- How to set up a game development environment in under 2 minutes
- How to prompt AI to generate a complete game
- The HTML5 Canvas basics that power browser games
- How to iterate on your game with AI feedback loops
Your dev environment in 90 seconds.
You need exactly three things: a browser, a text editor, and an AI assistant. That's it. No downloads, no installs, no configuration nightmares.
Open VS Code (or even Notepad). Create a folder called my-first-game. Inside it, create one file: index.html. This single file will contain your entire game.
Browser games using HTML5 Canvas run everywhere -- desktop, mobile, tablet. No app store approval needed. Your game is a URL.
Prompting your first game into existence.
Here's the prompt that changes everything. Open Claude or ChatGPT and type:
"Build me a simple browser game using HTML5 Canvas and vanilla JavaScript. Make it a click-to-catch game where colorful circles fall from the top of the screen and the player clicks them to score points. Include a score counter, a timer counting down from 30 seconds, and a game-over screen with a restart button. Make it mobile-friendly with touch events. Put everything in a single HTML file."
That's it. Paste the response into your index.html, save, and open it in your browser. You have a playable game.
The key is specificity. Notice we didn't say "make a game." We specified the mechanic (click to catch), the elements (circles, score, timer), and the constraints (single HTML file, mobile-friendly). Better prompts = better games.
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