How I got 20,000 people to look at my game demo | Florian Rudaj July 23, 2026<br>How I got 20,000 people to look at my game demo<br>I built a typing game in six hours with coding agents, posted it on Reddit and Hacker News, and got a lot of useful feedback!<br>shippingfeedbackAI coding<br>A few weeks ago I built a small typing game called Typocalypse and posted a demo of it on Reddit and Hacker News. The posts have been viewed around 20,000 times, the game got a steady stream of players, and I collected more useful feedback in a week than I could have generated alone in months.

This post is about how that happened. The game itself is almost beside the point here. The same approach works for practically anything you can put in front of strangers: a game, a CLI tool, a SaaS landing page, a weird little website. If you want to find out whether people care about the thing you’re building, you can get a first answer within days, and coding agents have made the “building” part of that loop absurdly fast.

From idea to playable in about six hours

The demo took me roughly three hours to get from idea to a first playable version, plus another two to three hours of polish to remove the most annoying bugs. I built it with Fable 5.

I started by writing down some loose thoughts about the game I had in mind. Then I ran Matt Pocock’s grilling skill, which makes the agent interview you about your idea until it actually understands what you want. It asked me a bunch of questions about the gameplay, the look and feel, the scoring, and so on.

From there I had the agent break the project into work packages, written as plain markdown files inside the repo. No Linear, no Jira, just a folder of files describing what has to be done. Then I asked it for the dependency graph between those packages and what could be built in parallel. One agent built the foundation of the game first. Once that was in place, I sent off several agents at the same time, each implementing one work package.

That got me to a first working version very quickly. I played it, found a few things that annoyed me, and cleaned those up in a couple of follow-up sessions. Then I recorded a video and wrote my posts.

All in all, about six hours from the first idea to something I could put in front of people.

Where I posted, and what happened

I posted in three places and asked a genuine question in each: what can I improve, what’s missing, are you having fun?

r/SideProject: about 17,000 views, around 90 upvotes, and 37 shares. Shares are my favorite metric here, because every one of them is a person forwarding the game to someone else.

r/vibecoding: about 3,000 to 4,000 views and around 15 upvotes.

Show HN: 5 points and a handful of comments.

The Reddit posts led with a 20 to 30 second video of me playing the game. I recorded it with the Windows Snipping Tool, which tells you everything about the production value (xD). I can’t prove the video is what made the posts take off, since I never ran a version without one, but I’m fairly convinced. A short clip lets people experience the thing while scrolling, and playing a demo is a much smaller ask once you’ve already seen it in motion.

On Hacker News that wasn’t an option: a Show HN is just a link and a bit of text; there’s no way to attach a video. The post stayed small in points, but the comments were detailed and useful. Posting to all three places cost me maybe half an hour.

The feedback

The views were nice, but the feedback is why I posted in the first place. Here’s one of my favorite comments:

The power-up that automatically kills a nearby weak enemy is BRUTAL for anyone who types fast and mentally queues up the next word while typing the current one. I’ll finish killing one enemy, immediately start typing the word for the next-nearest enemy, only to realize it’s already dead and I’m four keystrokes in. There goes the combo.

I would never have found this myself, because I don’t type fast enough to trigger it. One comment from one fast typist exposed a design flaw in a power-up, and I plan on shipping a fix for it.

Other feedback gained weight through repetition. Several people independently told me it was unclear how to trigger the active abilities. That made it obvious that this feature needs an explanation.

And then there were the comments that simply told me the idea works. My favorite came from a Korean player on the vibecoding post (translated from Korean):

I had a lot of fun playing. I got so into it at work that I got told off for my keyboard being too loud haha.

If someone on the other side of the planet gets scolded at work because they can’t stop playing your demo, the idea is probably worth pursuing.

And on Hacker News, one player made it to wave 37 and left a structured list of issues. Two of the bugs on that list I had already found and fixed on my own before reading the comment. Watching strangers and me converge on the same problems independently was oddly reassuring. It meant the feedback...