Dogfight Arena
Origins of the Project
The project originated as a response to a trend started by @levelsio, who popularized vibe coding by creating games entirely through AI prompts. Nicolas Zullo (@NicolasZu), inspired by this concept, decided to challenge himself to build a game that could rival Pieter Levels’ work in look and feel. Zullo used AI tools like Claude and Cursor, leveraging his experience with over 3,000 prompts in Cursor over the past 12 months, to create a fully functional game with realistic features such as hit impacts, smoke effects, and explosions, as noted in his follow-up post.
Success of the Project
fly.zullo.fun achieved remarkable success, accumulating 1.5 million views on X and attracting over 45,000 players within a week of its launch, as highlighted in Zullo’s comprehensive guide post on March 12, 2025. The game’s popularity led to server strain, prompting Zullo to consider increasing server capacity, as mentioned in his post on March 9, 2025. Additionally, the project attracted sponsorships, with @coderabbitai becoming the first sponsor for 500 euros, further demonstrating its commercial potential.
How It Was Made
The game was developed entirely through vibe coding, utilizing AI models like Claude (Sonnet 3.7 Thinking mode) and Grok 3 (from xAI) without any human-written code, not even minor edits. Zullo described the process in his “Ultimate Guide to Vibe Coding V1.0,” released on March 12, 2025, which took 20 hours, 500 prompts, and cost 20 euros.
He used Cursor as the primary platform, prompting AI to generate realistic dogfights, 3D environments, and multiplayer functionality via WebSocket technology. Zullo emphasized using Grok 3 for scoping and planning due to its “truthful, joyful, and sharper” outputs, while relying on Claude for coding, as explained in his response on March 13, 2025. The game features elements like a cityscape, dogfights, and in-game ads, all generated through iterative AI prompts.
We are growing in trafic! 20k view on twitter (from 1k this morning) and already 600 players tried the game! If you are an AI company and want to advertise, it's a good investment I think! You can sponsor the whole city for 500 EUR or just a billboard for 29 EUR pic.twitter.com/DYJ3comM7j
— Nicolas Zullo (@NicolasZu) March 8, 2025
External Resources
- Read Zullo’s “Ultimate Guide to Vibe Coding V1.0”: https://github.com/EnzeD/vibe-coding/blob/main/README.md
(Written by Grok 3, edited by Human 2025)