Nostalgia Driven Game Development
When I was 11 my family went on holiday to New York. We stayed in a hotel in Manhattan. I vividly remember landing at about 9am and making our way to the hotel and not being able to check in until midday. We were close to Radiocity so we walked over to see it and at about 10:30am we went to sit across the street on the ledge that the big red arrow is pointing at in the image below.
I remember a lot from that trip but recently one memory jumped out at me when I was watching @levelsio build a game using AI prompts. I felt a genuine wave of nostalgia pulsate through me and suddenly this game jumped into my mind.
While in New York my parents went to a broadway show so my brother and I stayed back in the hotel room, ordered room service and messed around on the TV. I found a game buried in the TV features and played it for hours that night. In the game you raced a unicycle around a track and did tricks. That's it. It felt like the future to me sitting in a hotel room playing a video game using a tv remote.
So I built Uniracers for myself using AI prompts (Cursor with Claude 3.7 to be specific). I didn't write a single line of code and probably so far have spent about two hours to get to where I am right now. Where is that? See for yourself:
This is me on the exact hotel room bed playing my gameboy (not Uniracers):
The future is a magical place when you can think of a memory and create something from it yourself. I don't need a game developer, I don't need to host it anywhere (it's hosted locally on my laptop), I don't need a designer. I need to be able to tell an AI what I want to create.
This feels significant to me.
This matters because if I am doing this then there are millions of other people doing and thinking in the same way. People who are tired of paying SAP hundreds of thousands of dollars for software that is archaic when they might be able to hire an AI engineer and write their own software for 1/10th of the cost. People who are tired of bloated notes apps or to do lists or habit trackers who can just build their own now.
This feels like a shift in culture and society to me. This past week I made use of AI every single day. Whether it's ChatGPT for my product management day job or bolt.new and Cursor for my side projects all the way through to Perplexity's free deep research tool to do industry and investment analysis.
I'm not a particularly technical person. I'm not an exception designer. I don't write amazing prompts. I'm just obsessively curious and hold the belief that AI tools are shifting the ground under us.
I want to be on top of the ground throughout this movement, not underneath it.
I'm thinking of shifting the focus of this newsletter to engage more with topics that relate to AI tools and how humans interact with them.
I want to know what you think of that. Reply to this email with your opinion and I will respond with mine.
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Stay curious,
Nic
Side project update
I've decided that to hold myself accountable I want to share an update about my side projects every newsletter:
New
Flirtbot - practice your opening line before you send it to your new match.
Pixeldash - Watch me build my game…
Significant progress
Decision Tracker - I built a landing page! 125 users, 9 likes and 3 comments! I found X.com engagement to be a useful method of marketing.
Still running
RantRobot - Still chugging along. Go rant.
Goodweeds - No change. A weed review site. Early development and currently testing out Leafy to see if it's worth me even pursuing Goodweeds.
StumbleSong - No change. Still around, still working but I haven't made any changes this month.
PositionMe - No change. An app for couples who want to try new sex positions. You both rate various positions and the app then suggests the most compatible options to you to try.
Deadpool
BucketListAssist - Added to the deadpool for now. Too complex for me to stay engaged.
What I’m reading
This week I finished reading Foe. Great psychological dystopian thriller. Don’t watch the film, read the book.
I just started reading a very unique book call Oona out of order.
What’s making me think
This absolutely insane voice AI model:
All of the businesses listed below are run by one person and generate millions in revenue. What’s our excused for not building something?
