There are a lot of people sharing the amazing games they're building on X, so it's hard to pick just one to hone in on, but I'm doing just that today with Vibe Sail.
Created by Nicola Manzini, the game was started on February 26th, and like many other vibe coding game devs, was inspired by the flight sim that Levels built.
The game started, like most games, with a very simple concept - one boat, one island, and a vast ocean. From there Nicola started to add physics mechanics to the boat, things like heeling angle based on wind direction.
At this point in it's history, the game had no official name and was hosted on sail.manzini.me. From here Nicola kept going deeper, adding an onboard camera and improving the physics around the boat tacking movement, along with dialing in things like rudder and sail control.
Anyone who thinks vibe coding isn't real game dev should really show themselves the door now because all of the things Nicola is doing here are things all game devs think about and do. He's not just writing some prompts and hoping for the best, he's thinking about things like physics, cameras, and game mechanics, and building those in, step-by-step.
The next day, Nicola took the advice of someone on X who had been following his journey and added wind control, which I personally think was a great idea!
At this point you might want to know Nicola's vibe coding stack - it's Cursor + Replit.
Two days after launching the game, Nicola had made a lot of progress, and he started to add some things behind-the-scenes to track how many people were seeing the game.
Two days, yes two, after starting to build the game, Nicola added multiplayer, and right away, people started to jump in and play.
Now here's where things get really interesting and where Nicola makes a move that I think could be one of the best nuggets in this case study. He wanted to get the physics right for his game. And yes, this is what professional game devs do, they go deep and learn from experts how they can make their game more realistic. In this case Nicola popped onto Reddit, went to r/sailing and learned how to make the physics in his game more accurate.
On March 2nd, it looks like Nicola moved off Replit, which I'm assuming had done its job getting the game off the ground, and was now specifically leveraging Cursor with Three.js, the main Javascript library everyone's using to vibe code games given how nicely it works with AI coding tools.
At this point I will share something that might be disappointing to some people, exciting to others. The people I see who have the most success vibe coding games, do know how to code, and more specifically, they know Javascript. Now I'm not saying you need to be a JS pro to build a game, but knowing the basics means you can dive into libraries like Three.js and really start to tweak things. While I don't know exactly what level of JS experience Nicola has, my guess would be he knows how to code enough to read through the Three.js docs and know whats going on beyond the prompts.
One day later, what every vibe coding game dev dreams of happened for Nicola, Levels discovered his game, and seems to like it. This got a lot more eyeballs on the game and some good questions from other aspiring vibe coding game devs started coming in, which Nicola was nice enough to answer. This is one of my favs showing how he went from Sketchup to Three.js.
And this is where things really started to accelerate for Nicola as more influencers on X started seeing what he was doing and shared their support, like this awesome post from the one-and-only Danny Postma.
And next came Florin Pop who shared this post with his 190,000 followers.
The next day, Nicola added islands to the game.
And a day after that, the domain was chosen - VibeSail.com ⛵
Fast-forward to today and there's now paid advertising live in the game, some pretty clean graphics improvements, and as of yesterday, a multiplayer leaderboard. And yes, see all those signs on the islands...those are paid ads, Nicola is generating real revenue with this game, a game that didn't exist just a few weeks ago.
I'm trying to keep my case studies relatively short(ish) so I'll leave it here for now. Congrats to Nicola and thanks for sharing your journey with us, can't wait to continue following your journey as a vibe coding game dev.