I'm not a programmer. I built 70+ free browser games for my kids with AI. Here's what I learned

PaiVelmoxia — Sun, 25 Oct 2026 00:06:20 +0000

I'm not a programmer. My kids asked me for a game "with our rules", and I didn't know how to make one. So I asked an AI to help me.

One of the first games was a small platformer with my daughter as the hero. Today there are more than 70 free games on the site, in four languages, and the whole family tests them. This is what I learned along the way, for anyone else who is "not technical" and wants to try.

The stack is boring on purpose

WordPress on managed hosting, because I needed something I could not break easily.
Each game is one self-contained page: HTML, CSS and plain JavaScript, no framework, no build step. The AI writes it, I test it on a phone, we fix it, repeat.
The Code Snippets plugin for everything custom on the server side: a small admin panel, our own cookie-free visit counter, a daily report.
Polylang for Portuguese (Portugal and Brazil), English and Spanish.
An Android app that is just the website wrapped as a Trusted Web Activity.

No React, no game engine. When you can't read code well, fewer moving parts means fewer things you can't debug.

What AI was great at

Turning house rules into code. "In our family, Sueca is played like this" is a perfectly good spec.
Boring but important stuff: saving progress, fullscreen on mobile, translations, accessibility labels.
Explaining things. I now understand caching, service workers and why my own stats were wrong, because I kept asking "why?" until it made sense.

What was hard

Card game opponents. Making a computer partner bid Bridge in a way that feels human took many rounds. The trick that worked: add a teacher. In our Bridge there is an owl called Mox who explains why each bid makes sense, so when the bot does something odd, at least it tells you its reasoning.
Rules have dialects. Every family plays Sueca or Truco a little differently, so each game needs clear rules on screen and sensible defaults.
Listening to feedback. A developer community told me my pages were cached for 31 days. They were. My host's gateway was overriding my headers, so the fix was a service worker that revalidates pages on every visit. The same people asked for a timer in Spider Solitaire, which was already there but too hidden.
Measuring honestly. One day my counter said 55 visits and 1 game opened. The bug was mine: I only counted a game as "opened" when it went fullscreen. Now it counts the first tap.

What I'd tell other parents

Start with one small game your kid actually wants. Their excitement is the best project manager.
Test on the real device they use. Most of my bugs only appeared on a phone.
Say out loud that AI helped. Nobody minded, and people were curious about the process.
Ask the AI to explain, not just to fix. That is how you stop being stuck.

Try it

Everything is free, with no download and no sign-up. A good place to start is the Bridge game with the owl teacher, or the full list of games.