Kerning Club

A daily typography game: fix the spacing, beat your friends

Lena VogtLaunched 3 days agoGameWorking · checked 3 hours ago
0:42

About

Every day you get five words with broken spacing. Drag the letters until it looks right, then see how close you got to a type designer's answer. Share your score as a little grid, Wordle style.

It's a showcase: the code stays private, but the full build recipe is here, including the prompt that generates the daily puzzles.

#typography#daily game#design

How it was made

Shared by the maker. Numbers are their own estimate.

Build time
4 evenings
AI spend
$14
Prompts
~70
Written by AI
90%

Agents

  • Bolt

    55% of the work

    First playable version in an afternoon

  • Claude

    45% of the work

    Scoring model and puzzle generator

MCP servers

No MCP servers. Built with the agents alone.

Build recipe

The code isn’t public. This is the whole project as one prompt: paste it into your own agent to build the same thing.

Written by Claude

From the project’s code and history · 323 words

Build a game called Kerning Club: a daily typography game: fix the spacing, beat your friends.

What it does

Every day you get five words with broken spacing. Drag the letters until it looks right, then see how close you got to a type designer's answer. Share your score as a little grid, Wordle style.

Stack

Use Svelte, Cloudflare. The original was built with Bolt and Claude in 4 evenings, for about $14 in AI usage.

How it fits together

  • A small game loop with one core mechanic
  • Local saves, plus a simple backend for sharing or leaderboards
  • A daily or slow rhythm that brings people back

Build it in this order

  1. Build the core mechanic with placeholder art and make it fun
  2. Add saving and the daily rhythm
  3. Add art, sound and the share feature
  4. Tune the economy or difficulty with a quick simulation
  5. Test it with five people and watch where they stop

A prompt that worked: Daily puzzle generator

Generate tomorrow's five Kerning Club puzzles. Use common English words of 5 to 8 letters that contain at least one hard pair (AV, To, LT, ry, f., etc.). Vary difficulty from easy to hard. For each word, return the letters, the ideal spacing as offsets in units of em/1000, and one sentence explaining the hardest pair.

Watch out for

  • Prototype the mechanic before any art
  • Respect the player's time: no timers designed to annoy

Done when

  • Someone new gets the mechanic in thirty seconds
  • Progress is never lost
  • It runs well on a mid-range phone

Before writing code, ask me up to five questions about who this just for fun game is for and what the first version must do. Then work in small steps: after each one, tell me how to try it and wait for my feedback.

Discussion

3 comments · 2 built their own

  • Priya RamanBuilt one3 hours ago

    Built my own version from the recipe in an evening. The build log is the most useful part for me, I'd love more detail on how you structured week two.

    • Lena VogtMaker2 hours ago

      Thanks! Good question, I'll write it up in the build log this week.

  • Noah FischerBuilt one1 day ago

    Rebuilt it from the recipe and had it running in under an hour. Would you take a PR that adds a Docker set-up to the original?

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