updownonly.com : Building my own crypto mobile game [part 3]
Development Day 7
After continuing to hit my head again the package.json brick wall for another hour I finally called back up and got my engineer boyfriend to bug fix things for me. It turned out I had created my directory within a directory and so I had duplicate files and a broken set up. Claude likely wouldn’t have caught this so I would have been stuck in my dev environment set up era forever more.
However with a few files and folders deleted I was back in business and now using another AI tool to level up — Cursor.
Whereas Claude is in-browser and then you use a coding environment like VS code to ‘write’ the code, Cursor is its own AI enabled coding environment plus it both suggests the changes to your code AND can apply them inline for you to — so no copy and pasting required!
As with every development day there was one step forward and another back, and although my UI was looking much better, nothing seemed to allow me to edit it. So I removed it all to start afresh, only for some magic to later happen and it all seemed to be piped up, editable and largely fine. 🤷
The UI and game starting to come together
I added a new homepage, connected up the crypto service with live pricing data from coingecko, finally got my retro style buttons working and spent WAY too long trying to add visual components like a galaxy and orbiting planet only to end up deleting them because Claude/Cursor just couldn’t bring my creative vision to life/ I’m not as much of a designer as I thought.
In the end whilst it was a BIG progress day where I finally got to a working dev environment, I once again hit usage limits, this time in Cursor, and found myself subscribing to yet another AI tool.
Development Day 8
This day was all about tweaking the game so that it was ready to launch. One item that copilot Curso and I were stuck on for a solid hour was trying to remove the rogue icons in the buttons. Cursor promised me several times that the necessary code updates had been made but still the icons showed up. Back up was called and put the AI to shame in about 10 seconds of looking at the retro-buttons.jsx code to remove the two rogue lines which were adding the icons. 🙃
Plenty of tweaks and polishes later and I was ready to start getting the game out.
Claude was useful here to walk me through the required steps but this time I was talking to him IN Cursor as the chatlog can be used for coding or just asking general questions. I asked him to walk me step by step what I needed to do to get the game into the world and provide me with the various options for each step.
The first one, and that I needed for the final element of the game design was a name! Finally I needed to move off the placeholder of ‘CryptoGame’. Surprisingly this didn’t take too much back and forth as ‘UpDownOnly’ came to me super quickly. The game is basically just predicting whether the next price will be higher (up) or lower (down) and since crypto has the infamous ‘up only’ (or more correctly for many cryptoassets, down only) as a phrase, this hit the bill nicely.
So I tweaked the design to change this throughout the game and I bought updownonly.com on domain buying website GoDaddy. I then had to connect the domain to my game and deploy it using a hosting service.
I created a Vercel account at Cursor’s suggestion (it’s ideal for noobs like me apparently) and then had Cursor run some commands to help get my new repo set up in github: https://github.com/Tara-annison/updownonly/tree/main . It walked me step by step and did all the commands for me so the process couldn’t have been easier. I was expecting for this to be the most technical element and after all my red error screens, buttongate drama and being stuck in the template screen for hours I was pleasantly surprised to have this all done in an hour or so.
and the game was live!
You can play it at ⬆️⬇️ updownonly.com and I hope you enjoy playing it because I had a ball creating it. I’d definitely recommend a Claude-Cursor combo for anyone looking to bring their own app, dapp or game to life.
Originally published at https://www.linkedin.com.
