Inspiration
The last few projects I've done for hackathons, I've fallen into the trap of vibe-coding them in order to bring ideas better suited for multiple people or longer periods of time to life within the scope of a hackathon. I wanted to create something small and defensible that I was fully familiar with the inner workings of.
What it does
At time of writing, it's a simple text-based turn-based combat system that's being expanded into a more complete RPG. You can currently heal or attack. I'm making some moves to make the project more object-oriented.
How we built it
I used various AI to try and help brainstorm, and ultimately landed on this turn based rpg game with Gemini 4 Hydrogen in the Ai Studio interface. From there, I had the ai act as a tutor- it provided natural language descriptions of some functions, I implemented them, and came up with ideas of my own. Essentially think of it like a pair programmer who is tutoring me as I go. (One time I did have it switch around an if statement that had gotten tangled up. I also did have the agy cli agent resolve some things with git since I wanted to focus on the coding side. Other than that the tutoring approach was held to.)
Challenges we ran into
Coding "manually" is a lot slower feeling for a hackathon when you're used to ai-driven development. It's also a lot harder to work solo, I think the next one I go to I'll bring a team along that all commit to this approach.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
A simple prototype was produced within a few hours. Nothing special, but it was far more meaningful due to being my own work, aside from the tutoring-focused interventions.
What we learned
That the satisfaction of performing the task oneself and correctly far outweighs the satisfaction of completing the project, as well as refreshing various Java concepts.
What's next for JavaRPG
I might decide to go ham with AI on it at some point or for some features, but I think continuing to flesh this out to practice my skills is the better idea.
Built With
- ai-studio
- java
