📖 The Story
During the school holidays, a software engineer and architect sat down with his two children — aged 4 and 7 — and asked them what kind of game they would make if they could make anything at all.
The ideas came flooding out. A wobbly round character with a face on its tummy. A world full of sweets and toys. Levels underground, in the sky, in space, even inside Mum's handbag. A special "Bonkers Mode" that makes everything go crazy fast. Rainbow accessories you earn by playing perfectly.
Instead of just describing the game, they built it — using modern AI tools to turn the children's wild ideas into working code, art, music, and gameplay. The children didn't just watch. They directed. They tested. They said "make the dinosaur bigger" and "add more candy canes" and "what if there was a portal world at the end?".
Belly Go Bonkers is the result. Every level, every obstacle, every silly accessory name came from those two kids. The dad wrote the code and architecture. The kids designed the game. And they all played it together.
📅 How it happened
The kids sat down with Dad and a blank page. He asked one question: "If you could play any game in the world that doesn't exist yet, what would it be?" Two hours of ideas later, Belly Go Bonkers had a name, a main character, and six worlds.
Dad used AI tools to scaffold the first working prototype — Belly running across a plain screen, jumping over toy obstacles. The 7-year-old immediately said it needed to be faster. The 4-year-old wanted more pink.
The kids named every world. The underground cave. The sky. Outer space. "What about inside Mum's handbag?" — and just like that, level 5 existed. Each world needed its own obstacles, its own music, its own mood.
The 7-year-old had the idea: "What if you collect enough sweets and then everything goes CRAZY?" That became Bonkers Mode — the screen shakes, Belly turns giant, the music doubles in speed. The candy cane became the power-up. The 4-year-old loved it immediately.
Accessories came from a conversation about rewards. "What if Belly could wear a hat? Or boots? Or a necklace?" And the portal world — level 6, unlocked only by collecting 5 perfect-run accessories — was the 7-year-old's idea of a secret ending.
The game is open source. The code is clean and well-commented. The learning paths you're reading now exist so that any family, classroom, or curious kid can open it up, understand how it works, and start making it their own.
💡 What the kids invented
Every single one of these came directly from the children. The dad wrote the code that made them real.
🧠 What game-making teaches
Building a game isn't just "learning to code". It's a crash course in eight different subjects at once — all in a context that's genuinely exciting for a child.
🤖 How we used AI
The children's ideas were too ambitious to build by hand in a few days. Modern AI tools made it possible to move at the speed of imagination — turning a 7-year-old's description of "a screen that goes crazy" into working code within minutes.
The dad acted as the architect and engineer: making decisions about structure, reviewing what the AI produced, fixing problems, and explaining concepts to the children as they appeared. The AI was the fast hands. The humans — including the 4 and 7-year-old — were the creative directors.
AI tools used in this project:
- 🤖 Claude (Anthropic) — code generation, architecture, refactoring
- 🎨 SVG generation — obstacle and collectible artwork
- ✍️ Claude Code — iterative development and code review
- 🧩 The children — game design, creative direction, QA testing
🚀 You can do this too
You don't need to be a professional developer to build something like this with your children. You need curiosity, a free afternoon, and a willingness to say "I don't know — let's find out."
The best thing about building a game together isn't the game. It's the conversation you have while making it. When your child asks "why does Belly fall down?" and you explain gravity using a number in a code file — that's a physics lesson that will stick forever.
When they ask "can we make it blue instead?" and you show them how a single hex code controls a colour — they've just learned how computers represent colour. Painlessly. Because they cared about the answer.
Belly Go Bonkers is open source precisely for this reason. Take it. Change it. Break it. Rebuild it. Make your own version with your own family's ideas inside it. That's the whole point.
Ready to make your own game?
Start by playing Belly Go Bonkers, then pick a learning path and start changing the code. Every task produces a real, visible change in the game — right away.