Guess-a-tron

Inspiration

I was inspired to kick off this little side project after a visit to a science museum with my kid. There was an AI exhibit with various challenges, one of them being a game that put players up against AI. Players had two buttons to press, if the AI managed to correctly predict the next button press it got a point, otherwise the player did. Whoever made it to the finish line first won. This was both super fun but also surprisingly hard. I wanted to see if I would be able to recreate this as a mobile game, and then Guess-a-tron was born.

What it does

Guess-a-tron is a lightweight mobile game where players go head-to-head against an AI in a guessing challenge. Each round, both the player and the AI make choices, and the results are revealed in quick, engaging matches. The game is designed for short play sessions, balancing simplicity with the excitement of racing against an intelligent rival.

How we built it

This game was build almost exclusively using AI agents. To draft up the concept, I used ChatGPT. It helped me create a very minimal MVP version. I then used this document to put Claude Code to the task, within an hour I had a working version. From there I spent the rest of the week refining it, giving the game more character (a GameBoy theme seemed ideal with the two button choices) and eventually submitting and publishing it, all within one week.

Challenges we ran into

Probably the biggest challenge was scope creep, there were a lot of new ideas that kept popping up and kept sneaking into the project. Another challenge were the game assets. I decided to keep them very minimal, using simple sprites and drawing the app icon by hand with some creative input from ChatGPT.

What we learned

It was very impressive to see how quick you can get to a first working prototype using AI tools. Claude Code really helped bring the idea to life and even suggested some improvements that I wouldn't have thought of myself (using Markov chain). Having to spend less time on implementation details helped me make bigger product decisions and really sped up the development process by a lot.

What's next for Guess-a-tron

Leaderboards, Apple watch app, interactive widgets, who knows!?

Built With

• claude
• swift
• swiftui