Lesson 01 · Build a Game by Talking

Step 01 · Ask

Describe the thing you want.

You don't open a code editor. You don't pick a framework. You describe the game in plain English and let the assistant build the first version.

You Build a simple Lunar Lander game in a single HTML file. Use canvas. Left/right arrows rotate the lander, up arrow fires the main thruster, gravity pulls it down. Just the lander, gravity, and the ground — no goal yet.

Claude Here's a single-file Lunar Lander with canvas-based physics, arrow-key controls, and gravity. The lander rotates with left/right, and up applies thrust along the lander's heading.

lunar-lander.html · 142 lines · live

What you're about to see is the raw first version. Gravity pulls things down, the thrusters work, the ground stops you. There's no goal yet, no fuel, no landing pad. Fly around and get a feel for the controls — the next two tabs add the rest.

Lander · v1 ← → rotate · ↑ thrust

alt—

vel—

Ready?

←→ Rotate ↑ Thrust

Use the buttons below ↓

A working game in seconds. You can fly it now — but with no landing pad and no win condition, it isn't really a game yet. That's the next step.

Step 02 · Iterate

Add the rules of the game.

Now you want a goal. You don't write a goal function — you describe one. Notice that you never touched the code; the assistant did the translation.

You Add a flat landing pad somewhere on the ground. Give me a fuel gauge that depletes when thrusting. I win if I land on the pad slowly and roughly upright. I lose if I crash too hard, miss the pad, or run out of fuel.

Claude Done — landing pad added at a random ground position, fuel starts at 100 and depletes per frame while thrusting, and the game now ends on either a successful landing or a crash.

lunar-lander.html · 186 lines · updated

Lander · v2 ← → rotate · ↑ thrust

fuel100

vel—

alt—

Ready?

←→ Rotate ↑ Thrust

Use the buttons below ↓

Now it's a game. You described win and loss conditions; the assistant turned that into collision detection, velocity thresholds, and a fuel counter. You didn't write a single line of code.

Step 03 · Polish

Make it feel finished.

Polish is just more conversation. You name the things that would make it feel real — and they appear.

You Add a starfield background that twinkles. When I crash, show an explosion of particles. Show "LANDED" in gold or "CRASHED" in red on game over. And make the landing pad subtly glow.

Claude Added 120 twinkling stars, a particle-burst explosion on crash, a soft glow on the landing pad, and end-of-game text overlays.

lunar-lander.html · 247 lines · polished

Lander · v3 · final ← → rotate · ↑ thrust

fuel100

vel—

alt—

Ready?

←→ Rotate ↑ Thrust

Use the buttons below ↓

The thing you imagined now exists. The whole process so far was three short messages — and you have a game that would have taken a junior developer a long afternoon.

Step 04 · Ship

Put it on the web.

This is the only part of the course where you'll leave the chat. Three short stations, walked one click at a time. Nothing to install. No account to make. About a minute, end to end — and at the end, your work is on the open internet.

01

Download the file

You'll take your game off Claude and put it on your own computer first.

Look at the panel showing this lesson. On a computer, it's to the right of the chat. On a phone, you can tap to open it full-screen.
Near the top of that panel, there's a small row of icons. Hover over them slowly — one of them is labelled Download. It looks like an arrow pointing down into a box (shown on the left).
Click it. A file is saved to your computer. Most browsers put it in a folder called Downloads. You can open that folder from Finder (Mac) or File Explorer (Windows).
Find the file in Downloads. It will be named something long like aithint-lesson-01.html. Right-click it, choose Rename, and change the name to exactly index.html.

If you get stuck Can't see a download icon? Just ask in the chat: "give me the code as a code block so I can save it." Claude will print it all out. Then open the Notes app (Mac) or Notepad (Windows), paste the code in, choose Save As, and name the file index.html. Make sure the .html part is at the end — that's what tells the computer this is a webpage.

02

Drop it on Netlify

Netlify is a free service that turns a file into a real website. You don't need to sign up.

Open a new tab in your browser. Press Ctrl + T on Windows, or Cmd + T on Mac. (Or just click the small + next to your other tabs.)
In the address bar at the top, type: netlify.com/drop and press Enter. You'll land on a page with a big area in the middle marked with a dashed border, saying something like "Drag and drop your site folder here."
Open your Downloads folder again (or whatever folder window has your index.html).
Click and hold the index.html file, drag it onto that dashed area on the Netlify page, and release. Netlify will start uploading immediately.

What you'll see Netlify shows a short progress message and then a link. You did not give Netlify your name, email, or payment details. It just hosts the file because that's what the page is for. If you ever want to update or delete your site later, that's the moment to sign up for a free account — but for this lesson, you can skip that entirely.

03

Your site is live

In about ten seconds, Netlify gives you a public address on the open internet.

The link will look something like https://random-words-12345.netlify.app. Click it.
Your game opens in the browser. It is now publicly hosted. Anyone in the world can visit that address and play it.
Copy the link. Send it to a friend. Send it to yourself so you can open it on your phone. Watching your own work run on someone else's device is the point of the whole exercise.

What you just did You built a working game by describing it in plain English. You moved one file from a chat window onto a server somewhere in the world. You did not write a line of code, install any software, or learn any commands. The link in your hand is a real website — the same kind of thing every company, news outlet, and school in the world publishes — built and shipped by you in about ten minutes.

What you just learned Four messages. One file. One drag-and-drop. From "I have nothing" to a working, publicly-hosted game on the open web. No frameworks, no build steps, no installs on your machine, no terminals to debug. This is how every project in the course works.