Where to Practice the New Skill

1. Not “another game,” but a pretty one

With Alex, Tommy isn’t pretending to be a busy professional here — you can be honest, no cover stories for the boss.

“Alex, I’m sick of these machines. The games work, they crawl around, count points — but open any one of them, and it’s wooden. Gray squares, jerky motion, a font like a school handout. It works, but there is nothing to look at.”

“What do you want, then?”

“I want a pretty one. One that’s nice to move around with your finger, one that makes your eyes stick. One you show someone and they go, ‘Whoa, you made this?’ And their jaw hits the floor, while I casually shrug: ‘Yeah, knocked it together in an evening, on the fly.’ Before, it was enough that the code did what people asked. Now it’s not enough. I want it to ‘look good.’ I want people’s eyes popping out, and me keeping a straight face.”

“Fair enough.” Alex doesn’t wave it off. “Only then let’s decide right away which project you’ll practice on. Smoothness and visual polish are easier to drill into not on a production page that you’re afraid to break, but on a separate throwaway thing. Something you won’t mind spinning and reworking ten times over.”

Tommy initially tries to object — he has his own, greedier idea:

“But why on something small? Let’s practice right on the landing page. A production task, and I’ll level up the beauty at the same time, and show Tony. And if I break something — I’ve got /rewind.”

“Bad idea.” Alex doesn’t buy it. “On the landing page you have a live client and your reputation. If you keep trying ‘what if this,’ ‘what if that’ there, it’ll go and fall apart at the worst possible moment. Beauty is learned where it’s not scary to break things. Otherwise you’re not experimenting — you’re walking through a minefield and afraid to touch anything.”

Tommy figures it out — and gives in. He already knows this tendency of his to jump into the fight right away, and he knows how it ended a couple of times.

“All right, you convinced me. I’ll take something small, something I won’t mind. Let the game itself be worth a penny, but let me crank the beauty up as much as I want.”

“Exactly. Take something with minimal rules and lots of room for beauty. Break it — rebuild it, nobody will notice. And the techniques you find there, later you’ll carry over carefully to the production page. First training, then battle.”

2. Snake as a testbed and a convenient cover story

After 20 minutes of discussion, it was decided to make Snake. Its logic is childish: it crawls, eats an apple, grows, slams into something — game over. Tommy has seen this mechanic a hundred times already, nothing to catch there. But there is tons of room for a “premium feel”: how it slides, how it reacts to the apple, what sound, what palette, how it pulses on the screen. The perfect testbed — rules for a penny, beauty for a ruble.

Tommy even gets fired up, imagining aloud what it could be. It could be neon — a dark background, glowing lines, like a night city. It could be strict and minimalist — clean, calm, expensive. It could be retro arcade in the style of old cabinets — pixels, flashing score. And then it pleasantly hits him: all of this is mood, and you can set it with words, not by drawing it by hand. Not “learn how neon is made,” but “say you want neon.”

And the cover story for the colleagues falls into place on its own. If they ask what you’re doing, the answer is ready: mastering animation for the landing page. And it’s not even a lie: some of the techniques from Snake really can be carried over to the work page later.

3. Why “make it pretty” doesn’t work

Tommy, inspired by the plan, immediately wants to see how it will go. In his excitement, he throws Sam the first prompt — short and straight from the heart:

Build Snake and make it pretty.

Sam doesn’t ask for a spec and gets to work. Apparently, the logic of Snake really is very simple.

He quickly assembles a working snake, adds some minimal polish — and delivers the result. Tommy opens it and winces. It works, but it didn’t turn out “pretty”: the colors are wrong, the font is corporate, the movement is still jerky. Not what he had in his head.

“Alex, that is just not it at all. I said ‘pretty.’”

“And what is ‘pretty’?” Alex calmly pushes back. “You said a word, and behind the word there is nothing. The agent heard ‘pretty’ and made ‘pretty’ in its own understanding. You didn’t explain what exactly to change — color? movement? font? everything at once? It just guessed.”

Tommy frowns. There’s nothing to counter with, and that annoys him a little — he thought one word would be enough. It used to be enough: “make a game” — and you got a game. But “pretty” suddenly turned out to be too empty a word for anything to be built from it.

“And how do you ask, then?”

“And now we’ll have to dive into theory. Are you ready for a serious lecture?”

“Like I have a choice,” Tommy writes defiantly. “Come on with your lecture you love so much.”

Alex doesn’t blink and starts:

“All these web things — both games and pages — work in the browser. But beauty and animation in the browser are built on three layers: HTML, CSS, and JS. Each has its own job. Until you know which layer is responsible for what, you’ll be asking blind — ‘make it pretty, generally.’ Once you know, you’ll be able to strike precisely: don’t touch this, change that over there. For now just remember the three words, and in a minute I’ll break down what does what and why.”

“Just no hand-holding, okay. I don’t need a frontend diploma; I need to know how to describe the animation in the spec.”

“Promise. Three words, three roles, in plain language. Right now, in five minutes, we’ll break it down — and you’ll stop asking like a novice.”