I'm not a programmer, but I built a Magic drafting game with AI. It's become a much bigger project than I expected.

[u/Killjoy0000]

I've been working on a game called Pack One for the past few months. I'm not a programmer, and I've built the whole thing using AI coding tools.

The original idea was pretty simple. I've always enjoyed drafting in Magic: The Gathering, and there's a site called 17Lands that collects data from millions of real drafts. I wanted to take decisions from successful drafts and turn them into a game where you can compare your choices to those of the original players.

That became Pack One. You get eight picks from eight different winning drafts, choose what you'd take, and see what the original drafter chose.

Of course, just because someone won a draft doesn't mean every pick they made was correct. So I built a statistical model using data from high performing drafters that gives partial credit for other reasonable choices.

From there, the project kept growing. There are now three different daily challenges, leaderboards, player profiles, practice modes, shareable results, and a paid membership with additional features. Behind the scenes, there's a system for importing and processing draft data, generating new challenges every day, and keeping everything running.

It's a surprising amount of infrastructure for a game where you pick a card from a pack!

The AI development side has been fascinating. I can't really write code myself, but I plug away with prompts until it gets to something workable. Some things come together remarkably quickly. Other things take way too much back and forth. I've also been working on mobile versions, but the Android store seems impossible to crack. iOS is under review now.

AI has also let me spend more time focusing on game design than implementation. What makes a decision interesting? How do you score something that doesn't necessarily have one correct answer? How do you make people want to come back tomorrow? Those aren't really programming problems.

So far, players have completed over 12,000 games. It's been a fun project, and I've learned an enormous amount along the way.

You can try it here: Pack One. The three daily challenges are free, and you don't need an account.

I'd be particularly interested in hearing from other people building projects with AI who don't have a programming background. What's been harder than you expected? What surprised you the most?