Sketched Earth is a riff on the classic Scorched Earth, a game I played many (many) years ago. I hope it's fun (and certainly, it was fun to build). I built Sketched Earth with a few intentions in mind.
First, fundamentally, I'm trying to solve for a desire I have as a leader in a workplace: how might our team play a simple game amongst ourselves to build memorable, non-work interactions? Sure, there are plenty of services that sell "team building" games to play. But I haven't found the one; and so I'm building to try to fit that purpose!
Second, I've built Sketched Earth (and many other applications) as simple, elegant explorations of how LLMs might be used to iteratively build production-grade web applications.
Process-wise, I started by vibe-coding a pre-prototype to prove the viability of the concept. My 8 year old was the sole play-tester. Thereafter, it required several weeks of work to rebuild the concept as a full Python/Node application. Without belaboring the process, my key ingredients are Python backends, Node frontends, Claude Code and Backlog.MD with careful test-driven development. I'm not finicky about LLM instructions, but I am finicky about pre-implementation reviews and refinement.
In the case of Sketched Earth, the audio and the graphics are also LLM-generated — from code, not through image-processing LLMs like Nano Banana. I haven't tried that pathway before. Fun!