How indie.game was built: a leaderboard vibe-coded in a weekend

There is a certain honesty problem in running a leaderboard for AI-built games if your own site was lovingly hand-crafted over six months. So let's be clear about the ledger: indie.game was built in agent sessions with Claude Code, on Next.js 16, Supabase, and Stripe, in the same vibe-coded, ship-it-tonight mode as half the games on the board.

It started life on 2026-08-21 as vibecoder.games — a directory. One day later it pivoted to a pay-to-rank leaderboard after outbid.lol made $139K in 65 hours selling rank positions. A day after that, Stripe paused payments pending review, and the board pivoted again: likes became the currency, the tweet became the price of admission.

The stack, honestly

• Next.js 16 App Router on Vercel — server components everywhere, one client island per interactive surface.
• Supabase for the board itself: games, likes, click events deduped by a salted one-way hash.
• Like counts read straight from the announcement tweet — no X API bill, re-counted every ten minutes.
• The art is generated by an Esy worker producing original game-style characters and scenes in seven styles.

What the pivots taught us

Every mechanic that survived all three versions has one property: it can be verified by anyone. The like count is on the tweet. The click count is deduplicated server-side and never reset. The rules fit on one page. Everything that couldn't be verified — hidden algorithms, editorial placement, promises about traffic — got cut, mostly by accident, and the site got better each time.

Ship the board before you deserve to. The games will hold it up.

If you're building your own game the same way — an agent doing the typing, you doing the taste — the board is where it goes when it's playable. Listing is free. The tweet is the price of admission.