Nest Wars

🐣 Inspiration

At a hackathon, you spend a lot of time waiting: for builds, deploys, and your AI agent to finish thinking. We wanted something fun for those 30-second gaps that also gives something back. That became Nest Wars: "While your Claude builds, have some fun playing."

Then we noticed that these tiny games measure real skills: reflexes, working memory, mental maths, focus under pressure. These are the same skills tested in quant and aptitude rounds of job interviews. So we turned a time-killer into an AI skills coach.

🎮 What it does

19 mini-games (5–30 seconds each) across 3 levels: Easy (6) → Medium (6) → Hard (7). Bug squash, Binary flip, Quick math, Simon says, Snake, Boss bug and more.
Collect 19 birds: every game you win hatches a creature (common, rare, legendary).
Live leaderboards: one per game plus an overall board for the fastest player to beat all 19. They update in real time as people play.
No signup: pick a username and play in 5 seconds. A recovery code lets you switch devices.
🧠 Nest Coach (AI/ML): every play is logged and turned into a skill profile across 10 attributes:

Attribute	Measured by
⚡ Reflexes	Reaction test, Bug squash, Boss bug
🧠 Working memory	Memory match, Simon says, Path memory
🔢 Quant fluency	Quick math, Binary flip
🎯 Focus & impulse control	Color clash, Bug swarm
🔥 Performance under pressure	Mistakes in the last 25% of the timer
💪 Resilience	Improvement after retries

The AI writes a personal report: your player type, strengths, growth areas 🌱, why they matter in real-life and quant tests, drills to improve, and a 7-day plan. Download it as a PDF.

🛠️ How we built it

Claude turned our game design spec into the first version of all 19 games: a mobile-first HTML/JS app with animations, confetti, googly-eyed birds and touch controls.
Base44 is the core of the product:
- Entities (database): Player, BestScore, GameAttempt, ProfileSnapshot, Analysis, PollVote, Report
- Backend functions: every score goes through a server-side submitResult that validates it. The browser can't write to the leaderboard directly.
- Realtime: subscribe() pushes new scores to every open leaderboard instantly.
- AI integration: generates the Nest Coach report from the computed skill profile.
- Auth: only the admin page needs a login; players stay anonymous.
Scoring model: each attribute is a percentile $p$ against all players, using each player's last 5 attempts per game. To keep reports motivating, the score shown is

$$\text{display} = 20 + 0.8\,p$$

so nobody ever sees a zero. The AI only writes the words: all numbers come from code, so it can't invent scores.

🧗 Challenges we ran into

Hackers are the users. Our players are people who love breaking things. We moved all writes behind backend functions and added fair-play checks: possible score ranges, minimum game durations, rate limits, and a report button on every leaderboard row.
Repeat games bug. Live players kept getting games they had already beaten. The cause was app state falling out of sync with the backend. We fixed it by always using the backend's returned player record and repairing affected players.
Snake lag on phones. We rebuilt the loop with requestAnimationFrame and a fixed timestep, kept game state out of React re-renders, and detected swipes mid-gesture.
Fair timing. Target games originally ran out the full clock. We changed them to stop the instant you hit the goal and grade you S/A/B/C on your time.
Motivating feedback. Raw percentiles told some players they scored 0. We redesigned the report around growth instead.

🏆 Accomplishments that we're proud of

Shipped live during the hackathon: [X] players, [Y] games played, real-time boards on the big screen.
Fixed bugs live from real player feedback within hours.
Built an AI feature grounded in real data, not just a chatbot bolted on.

📚 What we learned

Real users find bugs that testing never does; launch early.
In AI products, let code do the maths and the AI do the language. It's faster, cheaper and trustworthy.
Base44 let us go from a single HTML file to a full backend with realtime data in an evening.