A vaporwave space shooter born from vibe coding
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As someone with ZERO coding experience (aside from customizing my Myspace page with some sparkly HTML tags), I never thought I'd build a game. Vector Flux was born from curiosity and a newfound obsession with "vibe coding" - using AI-assisted tools like Cursor to bring creative ideas to life through simple conversation.
The journey wasn't without hurdles. My first version was just a triangle flying through a corridor of squares - clunky and visually unappealing. I redesigned everything with a vaporwave aesthetic, switching to particles for space effects.
Ship design was especially challenging - I spent hours iterating on the player ship and creating enemy behaviors while dialing in game-play mechanics. The projectiles flew everywhere but straight at first! Eventually, I added targeting systems, heat-seeking missiles, and ship animations like banking and pitching. Tinkering with effective projectile range, hit count, spawn rate and other factors forced me to consider things that as a user I always take for granted. But with tools like Cursor (who even come up with their own cool ideas like shields) you can confidently dive into function implementation by just... asking.
With just speech-to-text and conversational prompts, I built a working game in about two days despite having zero programming knowledge.
What started as clunky movements and basic shooting evolved through countless tweaks into fluid controls and engaging gameplay. But start small... Simple asks compound. I quickly learned to focus on individual components at a time. Lengthy prompts confused the models
Once I added AI-generated music from Suno and sound effects generated from ElevenLabs, the game finally felt like it had its own personality and came to life.
I implemented a functional leaderboard with Supabase despite never having worked with databases, API keys, or SQL before.
Learning to push code to GitHub and deploy with Vercel allowed me to publish and share my game. The streamlined process made publishing surprisingly accessible for a first-time developer.