From Zero Code to 25M Game Plays: A Non-Engineer's Journey Building with Claude + Cursor

A developer who had never written code three months ago used Claude (through Cursor) to build three browser games at dialed.gg, accumulating 25 million plays and 200,000 daily active users. The games are free, no signup, no app required. Two of them are single 8,000-line HTML files. The third migrated to Next.js + TypeScript. Total monthly spend: ~$2K on Cursor + Claude, ~$1.5K on Vercel + Supabase hosting. No engineers, no investors — just the developer and his son.

Key Technical Details

• Game 1 (Color): 8,000 lines of HTML, CSS, and JavaScript in a single file. Features multiplayer, daily challenges, leaderboards, anti-cheat. Hit 540K plays in the first week.
• Game 2 (Sound): Also a single 8,000-line file.
• Game 3 (Time): Built on Next.js + TypeScript after prompting Claude for a framework migration. Claude wrote the bulk of the code.
• Workflow: Prompt, review, test, prompt again. No documentation reading, no learning frameworks. Claude extended the single file indefinitely until they knew enough to ask for a migration.
• Lesson: Claude will not proactively refactor. Refactoring takes effort and tokens. The new setup might not be “right” either, but it works.

What Working Looks Like

The initial prompt for the first game was something like: “build me a memory game.” Six hours later a working game existed. Twelve hours later it was polished. The next day a database with a leaderboard was added. Two days after that, multiplayer. All through prompting Claude.

The developer notes: “Claude is happy to extend a single file forever if you let it. It won't proactively refactor. We had to know enough to ask for the framework migration when it was time.”

Who It's For

Developers — especially non-engineers or those new to coding — who want to understand the practical limits and workflow of building real-world applications with AI code generators like Claude. Also relevant for experienced devs evaluating the “single-file vs. framework” tradeoff and the cost of deferring refactoring.