I made a game about finding insects for my toddler niece. It's here.
My 2.5-year-old niece likes insects. Last week, I saw her zooming into photos of bugs on her mom's phone, and I had an idea for her first "videogame."
I thought she might enjoy a simple game where she could look under rocks for bugs. But, to keep it surprising, sometimes there should be non-bugs under the rocks. I wanted it to have a geocities-era blursed vibe to it.
My partner decided that the surprises should be emojis of our niece’s favorite things.
I chose to make it a progressive web app, because that way my niece could recognize the app on her mom's phone by the bug icon (she can't read yet.)
You can find the game at https://bugs.mikedebo.com. Make sure to ask your parents if it's OK first.
I'd love to share videos of my niece playing it for the first time, but for obvious reasons I won't be doing that. There was a lot of excited shrieking involved, which made me very happy.
- Scroll around the forest floor and click on rocks to find surprises
- The surprises sometimes peek out from under the rocks for maximum suspense!
- You can hurl the rocks by touching/clicking them to reveal the surprise beneath
- Uncle Mike will announce the insects; Auntie I announces the other surprises. (Auntie I doesn't like bugs.)
- Clicking the surprise will make more funny sounds.
Enjoy!
- Nora is much better at scrolling than I expected! I originally made the map quite small assuming she'd have a hard time navigating, but I was wrong.
- I thought she'd like the surprises, but she seeming dgaf about them. It's all about the bugs.
- Older kids also appear to appreciate the game. I thought it would be too dumb for them.
- It's liberating to make things for pre-literate kids. Eliminating text reduces options by a lot!
- I realized that I've made several games tailored to specific individuals. I guess it's becoming somewhat of a thing. I don't consider myself a "game-maker", but I find making games for specific people is quite satisfying. I can go from idea to "gift-sized" game very quickly.
I wanted the map to start focused on the center of the scrollable area, but the combination of myself and claude-3.5-sonnet could not figure it out. If you do, please let me know. I'm sure it's simple, but learning more about CSS was an anti-goal of this project for me.
- Forest floor texture from here
- Progressive web app template from here
- Bugs from here
- Bug icon from here
- All voices and sound effects courtesy of Uncle Mike and Auntie I. Thanks to Ms Rachel for "inspiration."
Thanks to Cursor and claude-3.5-sonnet for all the help. Claude, I'm sorry I rewrote 95% of your code. It's not you, it's me.