Faster Fronteds with Googles Gemini AI Studio

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Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio

This post is my submission for DEV Education Track: Build Apps with Google AI Studio.

What I Built

I set out to build a game: "Eras in Code", a text-based historical simulator designed to capture the unique mechanics and societal challenges of a specific historical periods in technology. The core concept was to use prompt engineering with a large language model to rapidly generate content and code for the game. Specifically, resource management and economic mechanics. The key prompts used were focused on generating content, not coding. I heavily utilized ai studio's ability to refactor code and generate fixes, which significantly sped up the process without writing any code manually.

Demo

You can experience it here: Eras In Code 🎮

It’s a swipe/click game that mirrors the developer journey — complete with users, cash, debt, and 4 difficulty levels.

Did you survive the game? Did complete all 9 levels? Did you find any easter eggs?

Hope you enjoy playing as much as I enjoy making it.

Full Write up: https://dev.to/j4s0nc/i-built-a-game-in-less-than-a-day-without-writing-a-single-line-of-code-4co6

My Experience

My key takeaway from working through "Eras in Code" was the astonishing acceleration of the prototyping phase. What might have taken a full week of manual coding was condensed into a few hours of focused prompt engineering and validation.

I learned that defining the input and output expectations for the generated code functions is far more critical than writing the code itself. The biggest challenge was prompt-chaining—ensuring the LLM maintained context across multiple, complex requests to build interconnected game systems.

What was surprising was the model's ability to incorporate subtle historical details and mathematical modeling when provided with a dense, constraints-heavy prompt, allowing the "era" to feel much more authentic than I initially expected from an AI-assisted build.