I Built a 2-Player Brain Game at a Google Community Event (and Then Leveled It Up)

Salman Tariq — Fri, 16 Oct 2026 21:32:20 +0000

Today, I attended Vibe Coding with Google AI Studio, hosted by GDG on Campus in Peshawar. The session was about Google AI Studio and how it can turn a rough idea into a working app in minutes.

At the end, the speaker gave us a challenge: build a game. The top 3 would get a surprise. 🎁

Here's what I built, what I learned, and how I took it further.

🎮 Play it first

👉 Play Number Nebula (full screen) · 💻 Source code on GitHub

Controls: Player 1 uses A D to move and W to fire. Player 2 uses the arrow keys. No friend nearby? Pick Cosmic Bot.

💡 The idea: Number Nebula

I wanted a game that is fun for kids but still makes adults think. So I mixed a classic space shooter with puzzles:

Math Duel: solve the sum, then shoot the alien carrying the answer.
Word Builder: read a clue, then shoot letters in the right order to spell the word.
Brain Mix: both, taking turns.

Two players share one screen, and every 3 correct answers in a row fires an attack (Freeze, Fog, or Meteor Rush) at your rival.

🔁 How I built it

Prompt: I wrote a structured prompt (concept, controls, levels, scoring, visuals) and gave it to Google AI Studio. It built a working version on the first try.
Iterate: I listed improvements and ranked them by impact. The biggest problem was that players never affected each other, so I added combo attacks.
Level up: I added power-ups, a boss battle, age-based difficulty (so a 7-year-old and an adult can play a fair match), a bot opponent, and the Word Builder mode.

My biggest lesson: make one change at a time, test it, then move on. Small steps beat one giant request.

⚙️ Under the hood

Pure HTML5 Canvas + JavaScript, one single file, no frameworks
Sound effects generated in code with the Web Audio API (no audio files)
A simple game loop: update positions → check collisions → draw, about 60 times a second

🚀 What's next

Online multiplayer, so two friends can play from different cities
Theme packs for Word Builder, starting with coding words like LOOP, ARRAY and CLASS
A global leaderboard