The idea started nicely: a digital molar that sends you on adventures, inspired by The Amazing Digital Circus. A 'digital pet' that generates games and small missions to boost your productivity, disguised as a videogame. What happened is a hands-on lesson about model limits, contexts, and expectations.
Sound fun, right? But how do you get an LLM to build playable microgames every day without breaking everything? This story shows the practical pitfalls.
What they tried to build
The author wanted to create a pet that generated full games in three.js every day, powered by a large model (Nemotron 30b). The idea was that those adventures would help productivity — a kind of hyper-gamified to-do list that feels like a game.
They started with long prompts that described the game logic and how to implement it. When that failed, they added skill cards (ability templates) taken from this repo game-engine SKILL.md. Then they tried to distill those skills with and apply to keep the information available to the model. In the end, the project became a simple HTML generator — able to create clocks, to-do lists, or , but not more complex games like .
