One of the coolest things about AI is it's making projects possible that I've had my mind for years, but never had the capacity to bring to life.

For years I've had the idea of building a game where people can practice investing and building their net worth with a real-life stock market and money simulation.

I had the idea while playing The Sims many years ago, where you choose a career path and go to work every day trying to get promoted, then your income goes up and you can buy more stuff for your house.

I always thought with a few tweaks a game based on that concept could be a really cool teaching tool for money.

I even went on Upwork at the time and tried finding programmers who could build it for me, but the cost was always way too much, especially because I didn't really expect the game to make any money, it was just something to build for fun.

The alternative was to spend a few years studying coding as a hobby and start building things myself - something I genuinely considered doing. However, back at uni I did a Computer Science paper and the whole paper was to learn how to make Space Invaders in Java. That was literally the whole course. Every day we'd learn a new thing, like how to write the title screen, then how to make the bullets, then how to make the bullets move, then how to make them move only when you hit spacebar.

It was probably the coolest paper I ever did at university, BUT I also knew the games I wanted to make would be waaaay harder and take hundreds of hours of study - sorry but nope!

Then in the last few years along came ChatGPT and suddenly things I couldn't do before became possible.

Just writing code to make charts in Excel and things like that.

And it finally dawned on me a few weeks ago - maybe AI could make that game for me?

I started with Claude, the free version, and eventually I needed to upgrade it, I spent about $100 on it. However, the only reason I did that was because I didn't want to keep waiting for my limits to refresh, I could have definitely made the whole thing for free if I was patient enough.

From there it was a matter of just describing exactly what I wanted.

The first message went something like - I want to build a game to teach people how to invest and grow their net worth. Think of it like a turn-based game where you start by choosing a profession, like tradie or banker, receive your salary and then set up all your moves, buying stocks, putting money in the bank, then you click Next Month to see how it played out.

It went to work and in less than a minute popped out a prototype. I was AMAZED at how accurately it came out, exactly like I'd imagined it in my head all these years.

Now, it definitely wasn't just click, click, and then the game was done.

I probably spent about 100 hours, testing it, replaying it, then tweaking it.

All the ideas came from me - I added term deposits, then I added variable interest rates based on the OCR, then I added higher rates for longer terms, then I added the INVEST 10K, INVEST 100K, INVEST MAX, buttons.

Before I added those buttons I was literally clicking the INVEST 1K button 100 times to invest $100k, which was pretty funny - I was lying there literally tapping away thinking "it would be so much better if you could just click once and invest everything", and then realising "BRO YOU'RE THE ONE DESIGNING THE GAME".

Then I asked Claude - "It's kinda boring just having a job as income, do you think we can add some side hustles?" and in a few seconds I had a prototype for a side hustles tab.

That took a lot of tweaking too, it was my idea to add upgrades so you could grow lawn mowing from a $50/mo side hustle into a national landscaping company, and then requiring months of experience before upgrading etc.

Once side hustles were ready to go, I thought maybe we could add a property aspect.

So I asked Claude "What about adding rental properties?"

Claude added a properties tab and we spent another few days tweaking that.

Then as I was trying to get my net worth to a trillion, I figured it would be way easier if I could leverage up. So I asked Claude "Let's add the ability to borrow from the bank".

So the term deposits tab turned into the banking tab, and now we could borrow a bunch of money based on our net worth.

This was one of the best tweaks because it showed how much trouble you can get into when you're irresponsible with debt.

So many times during testing I was on $100M net worth, borrowed a bunch of money to put into stocks and boom, bankrupt!

So the ideas need to come from you, because Claude doesn't often come up with them. It's great at doing design and mechanics, but it's definitely a case of you are the architect and Claude is the builder.

But the amazing thing is if you have an idea, any idea, it's now possible to bring to life.

Building a game like this would probably cost you $10K or more just a few years ago, now you can do it for $20, or even free if you're patient enough!

I've still been spending a few hours working on the game every day, adding new features like the Leaderboard, new player walkthrough, IPOs for new stocks as old ones go bankrupt, adding bigger and more expensive properties and hundreds of other fine-tuning that you would never think of.

I'll probably be thinking of new things to add or fix for many months, but that's the beauty of it - nothing is too hard any more, your time can really just be spent on creating instead of figuring out how to write a line of code.

So the real question is, what would you like to build?

What ideas have you had in your head for years, waiting to bring to life?

This site has always been about you creating more in your life, whether it's a tiny side hustle that brings in an extra $50/mo or a full blown business that replaces your salary.

Now with AI, the sky is really the limit.

Not to mention, IT'S FREE.

Just jump on GPT, Gemini, Grok or Claude and ask "build me a game that does X" and it will do it for you. It can build you an online store, design the cover for your first book of poetry, create a cartoon that you wrote a script for, anything.

So the lesson isn't really, wow, Bren built this cool game, but what can you start building today?

I can't wait to see it.

Get building!

P.S. Go play my game too. It's pretty awesome.