Three Prompts, One Glider: How Sunset Glider Grew a Shooter and Collision Detection

Three Prompts, One Glider: How Sunset Glider Grew a Shooter and Collision Detection

Two weeks ago I built a chill ring-collecting glider game. This week it's a shooter with enemy dirigibles and collision detection, and the entire "design doc" for that evolution is three plain-English prompts. Not three sprints. Not three branches. Three paragraphs of asking.

Sunset Glider v3 — banking over the islands at sunset, one ring down, four dirigibles on patrol

This post walks through all three prompts verbatim, what each one produced, and the one honest wrinkle along the way — because the wrinkle is the actual lesson.

v1: the whole spec was one prompt

Here's everything I typed to get the original game:

Build a relaxing glider that soars over low-poly islands collecting glowing rings against the clock. SMOOTH delta-time flight (no choppiness), gentle banking controls, a clear goal (collect all rings / beat the timer), warm sunset light. Make it feel purposeful and chill.

What came back: you fly through 12 glowing rings on a circular course. The timer starts at 78 seconds and each ring buys you 6 more. Banking and climbing flight physics, a third-person chase camera, low-poly islands under a sunset sky.

It built, passed verification, and installed on the first attempt. The settle record literally reads: outcome "installed", reason "installedOK", attempt 1.

v2: "make it a shooter"

Two weeks later I wanted more. Here is the entire change request:

This is a cool game but for the next version: 1) Make it a shooter so the rings can be shot to help complete the round. 2) Have interesting floating dirigibles that shoot at the glider and can be shot down.

The result: Space or X fires tracer bullets. You can shoot rings to collect them instead of threading them. Four patrolling enemy dirigibles shoot back — with lead-predicted aim, so they aim where you're going, not where you are. Dirigibles take 3 hits to bring down, with procedural explosion audio when they go.

The honest wrinkle: the first v2 attempt wrote the shooting and dirigible code but ran out of its turn budget before wiring it into the game loop. The build "worked" — but nothing shot. A follow-up iteration session wired it up.

Here's why I'm telling you that instead of hiding it: when an iteration costs a prompt instead of an afternoon, a failed attempt is a shrug, not a setback. I read the result, asked it to finish the wiring, and it did. So call it three prompts and one nudge. That's the whole recovery story.

v3: collisions, please

Later that same evening, one more ask:

This game is great! The only change is that there is no collision detection of the glider into the islands or the dirigibles, which is not very realistic. Collisions into these game pieces should result in destruction of the players glider.

Now clipping an island or hitting a dirigible destroys your glider. Clip an island and you get "Clipped an island — Your glider caught an updraft from the islands." Hit a dirigible and you get "Collision with dirigible — Your glider struck a patrol dirigible." Under the hood, islands use a horizontal-distance plus height-threshold check; dirigibles use a straightforward 3D distance check. Simple, appropriate, and it changes how you fly.

And all three versions are still installed side by side — v1, v2, v3. Iterating never destroys the previous version.

Run facts

For the people who want the specifics:

Reusable Lego, not boilerplate the model has to reinvent.

What the platform actually did

The prompts are the fun part, but the unglamorous machinery is why this works:

No three.js. Really.

I'll admit I assumed the harness would reach for three.js. It didn't, and the result is better for it.

Sunset Glider is one self-contained HTML file, about 40 KB (v1 was ~28 KB). No three.js, no WebGL, no frameworks, no CDN scripts, no build step. It runs fully offline.

Forty kilobytes for a flying shooter with enemy AI, flight physics, and audio it synthesizes on the fly. I find that genuinely delightful.

Go fly it

Play it right now, in your browser: Sunset Glider.

If you want to see exactly how it was made, the detail page has the full Build Materials — the original prompt, the complete build transcript, the agent instructions, harness context notes, the mini-app manifest, and a downloadable source archive. Sign in free at mchatai.com to read them. It's the whole remix kit; nothing is hidden.

And if you'd rather be typing prompts than reading mine: mChatAI+ is a native macOS app, AIWizard is the builder, and it works with Claude, GPT, Gemini, or local models — bring your own API keys, local-first and private by default. Get mChatAI+ here.

Three prompts. One glider. Your turn.

— Lawrence