QueerCade is a community vault of LGBTQ+ games. It lived as a work-in-progress site at queercade.mikedemo.dev, and last week I rebuilt it properly in WordPress at queercade.gay: a searchable archive of 7,199 games, an interactive constellation of 876 queer characters and 1,788 connections between them, an emoji oracle that recommends your next game, and member libraries for tracking what you own and what you have played.
The rebuild took five days, October 22 to 27. This week I submitted it to two showcases: the Elementor Showoff (in a day ahead of the deadline) and WP Showoff, where it is now waiting on a hand review.
The 54-second tour (this is also the homepage hero video):
QueerCade — Every Queer Game. One Arcade.
videopress.com
Watch: https://videopress.com/v/E5Apx9SN
The interesting part is how it got built, and I want to be precise about that, because "AI built my website" claims are getting sloppy.
The rules I set
- I designed the site myself, in Google Stitch: 13 screens, one design system, no placeholder data in any of them.
- The designed pages were built through the official Elementor MCP, on free Elementor only. No Pro license hiding in the stack.
- Everything a designed page cannot do lives in a custom plugin I built for the site, QueerCade Connect (v0.46.16 as of this writing): the catalog mirror, the constellation, the oracle, member tracking and personal collections, social sign-in, the works.
- Jetpack does the jobs Jetpack is good at: Search, VideoPress, Boost, the newsletter. WordPress core does the rest.
- The catalog data still lives in Sanity. WordPress mirrors it; Sanity stays the source of truth.
The receipts
I published the whole build trail in a public Gist: every prompt I sent, plus the site's sanitized WordPress activity log for the build window.
QueerCade build prompts and activity log (Gist)
Numbers from that log:
- 34,261 activity events across five days (29,324 of them REST API calls)
- 9 prompts built the first 9 designed pages in a single evening; the first Home composition alone placed 54 elements
- Catalog grew 753 → 7,199 games in one approval pass; 3,290 covers sideloaded in 344 batches with 0 errors
- Media library metadata finished at 4,245 attachments, zero missing alt text, captions, or descriptions
- Schema validation sweep: 7,207 URLs checked, 0 with errors
- GTmetrix (Chicago): main pages scoring in the high 80s and 90s for Performance
The constellation, with Ellie from The Last of Us selected:
And the emoji oracle:
The long-form version of the story, with video, is the X article I wrote for the Elementor submission:
What the MCP could not do (the honest friction)
Driving a page builder through an MCP server works better than I expected, and it is not magic. Three things worth knowing if you try this:
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Verify persistence, not success messages. The Elementor MCP's element update operations sometimes reported success while the change did not persist. Later design edits rode WordPress REST patches to
_elementor_datainstead, followed by Elementor's Clear Files & Data, because Elementor serves a compiled render. - A generated revision is not your live page. One MCP pass wrote its hero work into a revision whose round-trip also stripped styles from unrelated elements. The shipped pattern: take the node the MCP generated, splice it into the pristine live document over REST, then clear the cache. Check the diff before anything goes live.
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Some fixes belong below the builder. The homepage hero video wanted to preload 41 MB. The builder's settings schema has no preload control, so the plugin rewrites the rendered tag at the PHP output-buffer level (
preload="none", load on hover, play on click). Homepage weight dropped from ~43.6 MB to ~2.3 MB.
Every cornerstone page was captured across 9 device and browser configurations before launch, 126 captures in the full matrix:
Watch the build
The five-day build, compressed to 70 seconds:
Six Days. One Vault. — Building QueerCade, Oct 22–27
videopress.com
Watch: https://videopress.com/v/cSIt73FS
And the before and after, template site to arcade vault:
Watch: https://videopress.com/v/kiK3zZxR
The disclosure part
WP Showoff asks every submission how AI was used: AI Generated, AI Assisted, or No AI. I picked AI Assisted, because that is the truth of this build. A human designed it, directed it, wrote the plugin that runs it, and reviewed every change. An AI agent held the mouse for a large share of the page building, and hiding that would be worse than saying it.
If the receipts make one argument, it is this: the interesting question is no longer whether AI helped build a site. It is whether the builder can show their work.
QueerCade is live at queercade.gay. Go find your next game.
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