Go monkey

A few months ago, my son asked to build a game.

I thought he meant "teach me to code." Variables, loops, if-statements, the usual suspects.

He didn't.

What he wanted was harder to teach: taste.

He had a vision, a monkey collecting bananas. He wanted it to feel right. The jump height. The way the monkey moved. The color of the background. The size of the bananas.

I'd stumbled into Vercel's tools that week, and honestly, I was just curious how far we could get without me writing much code.

He got exposed to gravity, sprites, collision detection. With Vercel and ChatGPT we turned a Saturday morning idea into a playable game by lunch.

Yesterday, out of nowhere, he asked: "Dad, can we add more to the game?"

Not "can you add more." Can we.

He wants treasure boxes with varying amounts of money. A store where you can buy jetpacks to reach higher bananas. Power-ups. Progression.

I thought I would be teaching him how to code a game, but we ended up focusing on the user experience.

The best product work doesn't stop at frameworks or architecture diagrams. It's in the tiny details of caring enough to notice when the jump height feels wrong.