Making games in Go: 3 months without LLMs vs. 3 days with LLMs

Introduction

After 15 years as a software engineer, I realized I had never actually built and published a game.

Since I grew up in 🇦🇷 Argentina playing card games with my friends, I figured I’d choose one of those. I asked myself:

Truco: 3 Months Without LLMs

On June 18th of 2024 I started building Truco in my free time. As a longtime Go backend developer, the backend was obvious. The challenge was the UI and long-term hosting without a paid server.

Problem Solution UI Bit the bullet and learned the minimal required React for the UI. No server Transpiled the server to WASM using TinyGo. Hosting Used GitHub Pages to host the static files.

This was pre-LLM, so every detail had to be figured out by hand. It took about 3 months of trial and error to get it ready.

I never planned to advertise or monetize it; I just wanted to finish, and maybe give someone the joy of playing their childhood game again. A year later, without any extra effort on my part, people are still playing it!

In case you want to check it out, here are some links for it:

Truco (play the game)

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