Protect Your Eggs

Summary

On Sunday 13 September my son Jurre (7) and I built a game. He plays Roblox on his iPad, I wanted to see what happens when a child steers an AI agent himself. By the end of the evening there was a result: a multiplayer game, Protect Your Eggs. This post is about how that went, what the game does, and who took over when.

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The prompt

I made a small start with a simple prompt: let us make a game that is a cross-over between Minecraft, Flappy Bird and Roblox's Steal an Egg. In HTML5 and Three.js, because I know that runs well on every platform, from a Linux laptop to an iPad. The agent was Claude Code on the Framework 12 with Omarchy, the same machine I write these notes on. Twenty minutes later there was a blocky field with four bases, a market with eggs in the middle, bots that steal, and a player that flaps like a bird. It ran from a file on disk, no server, nothing installed.

That was my part. Then Jurre sat down.

Jurre takes the keyboard

He knows Roblox better than I do, so he typed the improvements himself. Literally: a seven-year-old at the keyboard of a Linux laptop, typing in his own words what he thought would be cool. That you can buy guards. That there are more monsters the higher your level. That at nine in the morning on a Saturday there is admin abuse during a thunderstorm. That you can buy a treadmill up to level 100, and a lock that keeps everyone out of your base but also keeps you from grabbing eggs. Later: mythical, secret, eternal and divine eggs, and that you can choose how long a round lasts.

This is one case where natural language programming wins. He verbalises the mechanics he finds fun, and a few minutes later we try them. The real exercise for him is finding the words: what is wrong, what could be better, what would be awesome. I think that skill is very useful outside game development too.

Twelve minutes

I was in awe of the speed. He was not. Halfway through the afternoon, while the agent rewrote the game for multiplayer, he sighed: we are already waiting twelve minutes, dad, this is taking so long. Perspective changes quickly. For me twelve minutes for a game server is science fiction. For him it is the time between an idea and the moment he can play it, and that felt slow. In Rapid Iteration in Agentic Loops I wrote that the loop should be as short as possible. A child tells you the same thing without the theory.

On the iPad

He wanted touch controls, because that is how he plays. So we set up a small server on the machine in the homelab and played the game over wifi on his iPad, with a Roblox style thumbstick and a big jump button. That also turned the game into what it is now: real multiplayer. Up to eight players, empty seats filled by bots, and when the first human joins a bots-only room, the round restarts so the goal, first to level 10, is fair. He tested, I fixed. The skip button of the tutorial that did nothing on the iPad, the shop buttons that hid under the controls, a blue bar at the bottom of the screen. The excitement during debugging is energising.

Dad takes over

A game that only runs on the laptop on the coffee table is a toy. A game with a public address is a product, and that step I took. The evening went into the things a child does not see: a name, chosen by Jurre, and a logo. A domain, protect-your-eggs.dsd164.com, and the same cloud setup I use for my other little apps. A page on privacy and child safety, written so that a child could read it: no data collection, no chat, rude names are replaced automatically, no accounts, no ads, no purchases. A small icon so it can be pinned to a home screen. Metrics, so I can see how many people play and how the server holds up. Not the fun part, but the part that makes it real.

The game

Protect Your Eggs is simple. Grab eggs from the market in the middle, carry them home, put them in your nests. Eggs in your nests pay coins. Coins fill your level bar and buy guards, extra nests, flaps, boots, a bigger base, a hammer and the treadmill. Others steal from you, you steal from them. Every level adds a monster. Thunderstorms bring extra eggs and lightning. ADMIN ABUSE brings fifteen seconds of moon gravity, egg rain or giants. Rounds last five minutes, the first to level 10 wins. It works with keyboard and touch, on a phone, a tablet or a laptop, in the browser, for free.

These screenshots are from today. A lot will still change, this is the first day of the game (and Jurre has many more ideas!)

Jurre's piggy bank

One more thing he asked for: Jurre is saving for his first real laptop, and he wanted a way for people to help. So there is a piggy bank button in the game: drop a coin in Jurre's piggy bank. Every cent goes to him! Cannot donate? Tell your friends about his game, that helps just as much.

Conclusion

What I learned this Sunday is not about the AI agent. I already knew it could build a game in an afternoon; in February I wrote about three games in three weeks. What I did not know is how naturally a seven-year-old takes the wheel. He did not learn to program today. He learned that an idea, said out loud and clearly, becomes a thing you can play. The waiting, twelve minutes at most, was the hardest part for him. I suspect that for his generation it always will be.