First Game Idea: Geometry Dud

What game to make? Something simple so I have even the slightest chance to finish and ship.

My son has been playing a lot of Geometry Dash. The controls are simple, just press a button to jump. Geometry Dash has a lot of polish and extras to make it fun, but maybe I could build something similar with themes that my kids would find enjoyable or funny.

I'm also toying with including gravity as a mechanism to speed up on slopes and use momentum to make jumps. I'm drawn to games with interesting physics.

In my head it's fun to play. But I've burnt out many times before toiling for months on a game, because the thing I was building was incredibly not fun.

Prototypes are the answer, and conveniently Claude is wonderful at churning those out. I don't need to build an entire game in Rust, I just need something that shows the rough mechanics, enough to feel whether it sparks joy.

I'm looking to make a simple game. Before I commit to an idea, I'd like to prototype it first.

The idea is a clone of Geometry Dash, but I want it to use gravity as the primary mechanism for moving forward. The player controls a ball that gains momentum and has to jump over gaps and obstacles to reach the end of the level.

Can you prototype something like this in an HTML app?

5 minutes and $1.60 later, I have a ball rolling around on some slopes: HTML Prototype

I'm impressed it made something playable without any external packages. It's also wonderfully boring in a way that made me immediately discard this as a potential game idea. I know that the level design is really what makes these runner games interesting, but I have zero interest in doing that. I don't even like Geometry Dash that much, why would I want to make a clone of it?

Best $1.60 I ever spent.