You've been playing the Vertical Shooter — blasting asteroids, fighting bosses, and unlocking themes. But how did it go from an idea in someone's head to a real game you can play on your phone?
Today, we're going on a mission to find out.
You write "hlelo" instead of "hello" — the computer doesn't know what you meant
You tell the player to go UP when they press DOWN — oops, backwards!
The game just stops completely — like a car engine dying in the middle of the road
Find it → Investigate → Fix it
Play the game yourself — every button, every theme, every level
What if you press ALL the keys at once? What if you pause during a boss fight?
Fix the bug, then test again — sometimes fixing one bug creates a new one!
If you were testing the Vertical Shooter, what's the first thing you would try to break?
Every piece of software — every game, every app, every website — follows a launch sequence. Here are the 6 phases that built your Vertical Shooter.
NASA doesn't just throw a rocket into the sky. They plan, build, test, and THEN launch.
You → AI Assistant → Blueprint
We described what we wanted to an AI assistant: 5 themes, boss battles, a token shop, and googly eyes on enemies. The AI wrote a detailed blueprint — like an architect's plan for a house.
The human reviews the blueprint. Does this look right? Is anything missing? Should we change the themes?
The human is always the boss.
Approved!
"Looks great, let's add one more power-up."
Needs Changes
"Change the enemies, add more levels."
Now the AI writes the actual code. The Vertical Shooter has over 20 files and thousands of lines of code!
We run the game on our own computer and try to break it ON PURPOSE.
Like a test flight — NASA doesn't send astronauts up without flying unmanned first!
Save your work with a message: "Added boss battles and power-ups"
Work on a copy so you don't break the main version
When it's ready, combine your work into the official code
Committing is like saving your game at a checkpoint — you can always go back!
The moment we merge to main, GitHub automatically sends the code to AWS — Amazon's massive server farm. No human touches a button!
3... 2... 1... the code blasts off to the cloud!