Building Games at the Gym (Kind of)

Recently, I was working out with a couple friends. Between sets, I pulled up my personal website to show them what I’d been working on. One thing led to another, and they were curious about my coding workflow - so I did what any reasonable person would do: I offered to build something on the spot.

Their first suggestion? Pacman. Specifically, an offline version they could play on their laptops without downloading an ancient console emulator. I drafted a high-level prompt, generated a workplan, lightly revised it, ran it through Codex, and - in a few minutes - we had a working game.

The game was functional, had multiple levels, and was consolidated into just three files: index.html, script.js, and style.css. It was intentionally was a minimally viable demo, but it worked and we were playing it within minutes.

Then, Vincent had another idea - What if we made a game that picks which muscle group he trains on a given day? Although it seems somewhat random, tthe core feature is that it would always pick chest day (make of that what you will).

The next step was to take that idea and reimagine it as a proper desktop game - one key command, progressively harder levels, kind of like Run. The kind of game that is intuitive and naturally engaging.

Two things stuck with me afterward. First - I hadn’t coded casually in a while. I’d forgotten what it felt like to build something just for the fun of it. I’m going to make time for these spontaneous projects in the future. And second - my friends (who have taken intro coding classes in college) were genuinely blown away by this experience. It’s unbelievable how far tooling / models / applications have progressed, where demos like this are possible on-demand. What a time to be alive.