Feed Melvin
Adventures in Triple Feeding
(Vibe it and Focus on the Art!)
Our first born came to us in January of this year (2026) two weeks early. It was clear that he had plenty of room to grow and our sleepy newborn needed a lot of attention to get him to gain weight in the first few months. We understood that he needed to gain at least 1 ounce per day to get on track and so I did what I tend to do when faced with a challenge. I turned it into a game!
We bought a scale, fed him every 2 hours (or more if he wanted it), washed ALOT of bottles, and weighed him daily to gauge how we were doing without having to wait for a checkup at the Pediatricians office. If he was on track for that day we celebrated. If he came in a little low we tweaked the frequency, amount per bottle, kept him upright, burped him more frequently, and did our best to find the balance of giving him the opportunity to eat as much as possible without spitting it all up!
All that work paid off and the little guy (well not so little anymore) has more than doubled his birth weight!
While all that was going on, I thought "Hey, since we've made this into a game. Mabye I could make this into a game that you all can play as well..."
Using Gemini on my mobile phone, I was able to do all of the vibe coding and testing with one hand while feeding an infant! Finding time to sit at my desktop computer to work on projects was very limited if non-existent when our baby was just a few months old. Because of this, I looked for ways to test the game that was being generated on my phone on that same device so that I could work on it in spurts while feeding bottles and running errands.
A web browser game fit the bill perfectly. If I could generate functional web code with Gemini then I should be able to test the .html file on my phone in any browser. Growing up I was really enamored by the digital pets of the 90s like Tamagotchi, Pocket Pikachu, and Digimon so when I started by prompting the coding assistant I asked it to make a blob that gets bigger every time you tap on it to simulate feeding.
I copied the HTML and JavaScript from Gemini into the Quick Edit app on my phone and saved it as a .html file. From there I was able to open it in Chrome or using the RUN feature in Quick Edit. It may seem underwhelming but this went from an idea in my head to something I could work on no matter where I was almost instantly. The first version of the game looked like this:
With my son propped up in my lap and a bottle in one hand, I watched my blob grow when I tapped feed and shrink when I stopped. Then I thought, “Wouldn’t this be more interesting if you had to be careful to not over-feed the blob like an infant?” So I continued to prompt the code assistant and tweaking parameters and this little blob feeding game began to evolve into a baby feeding simulator.
By default Gemini wanted to be my assistant, not my programmer. The Canvas feature in Gemini had not yet been released when I started this project and Gemini’s posture when working on this was to give me coding advice and snippets by default, not full code. Because my time was limited I wanted to have a true vibe-coding workflow for this project and so I started instructing the AI to strictly deliver edits made in the full game code.
Within a chat session Gemini would generally get the hang of this and do it without being asked but occasionally would forget and deliver snippets and instructions instead. When this happened I simply entered a prompt asking it to incorporate the edits or new features into the most recent version of the full code.
As a programmer Gemini is over-zealous. Vibe Coding allowed me to avoid sifting through hundreds of lines of code but I quickly realized that each iteration would potentially lose aspects that I was happy with, or new elements would be introduced without my asking for them. The AI wanted to be proactive and would deliver my requests back to me with “Here is your update, and I also did this that and the other thing while I was at it!”
Sometimes those suggestions gave me interesting ideas for next steps but the process was overall unstable and unsustainable if I was going to continue to work this way. I started adding “only make changes that I explicitly ask for” to every prompt until Gemini pointed out that I could add Rules in the preferences for the app. Once the “only do what I ask you to rule” was applied the process became a lot more stable and if I was brainstorming I could still ask Gemini to suggest things.
I continued on the path of keeping all development locally on my phone for the prototyping phase all assets were embedded in the game code itself. This consisted of SVG graphics contained in the code as Base64encoded images (generated by Gemini) and sounds produced by JavaScript oscillators during gameplay rather than loading an external audio file.
At this point I had a full prototype of a baby-feeding simulator with a countdown timer to simulate the limited time a parent has in a day, visual growth when feeding him, and weight gain that occurs at the start of the beginning of each day. I even had a spit-up effect for when the overfeeding penalty was triggered.
I was excited to share my progress so I uploaded the prototype as a subpage on this Squarespace website and started texting it to a few friends and family members. You can play the early version here:
I knew the artwork needed some love if I was going to keep working on this past the prototype phase. Because the graphics were generated as SVG images, I had the idea that I could use Adobe Illustrator to make custom artwork to replace it.
Then everything fell apart.
