
The Pink Blur! Using AmazonQ to Make A Game From Scratch
The faster you go, the faster you can go faster ...
Published Jan 14, 2025
When my kids were much younger, we invented together a set of superheroes - including The Pink Blur, a superhero so fast she can journey across space and time, usually to fight her arch-enemy, Dr. Volcano. Since then, I've owned ThePinkBlur.com domain name - like many developers with many domains names they never use - all with the vague idea of one day turning it into a comic, or a story ... or a game. Enter the Amazon Game Builder Challenge and I finally saw a chance to bring the Pink Blur to life! This post is how I went about making the game in my spare time over the last couple of months, using AmazonQ (the Amazon genAI coding assistant).
First things first - what was I trying to build? Making games is both easy and difficult - it's easy to make something that people can play, it's very difficult to make something that they'll want to play again. So some basic requirements:
- It has to be fun - measured by my testers' (my kids!) interest or lack there of, in the game. Six year olds can be ruthless with their time and opinions; as I started building the game mechanics with no real gameplay or fun, mine would try it out and pretty much immediately say "Can I play Friv now?". I knew it would need to be good for them to want to play it again.
- It has to be easily accessible - for me that meant available on a web browser, no download needed etc. Just go to ThePinkBlur.com and start playing.
- It needs to be different - the challenge isn't just about using AmazonQ, it's about making an innovative game; again - this is difficult!

So - I came up with an initially standard enough idea of a side-scrolling 2D game, where The Pink Blur would battle through sinister forces across space and time to reach Earth, where she's so desperately needed! However, the wrinkle to make it more interesting is ... SPEED!
The Pink Blur is all about speed!
- To finish a level, you don't have to travel a certain distance, you have to reach a certain speed!
- As she gains more speed (because she accelerates all the time!) she gets more abilities and powers!
- e.g. when she reaches a certain speed she can she can fly, and more!
I was heavily influenced by a quote I heard from former US Air Force pilot Col. Nicole Malachowski at a work conference in 2024 - she said fighter pilots have a saying:
"The faster you go, the faster you can go faster"!
And to me, that sounds exactly like something The Pink Blur can relate to!
I also added a "Space Store" between levels - where the player can spend the coins they collect in-game on fun stuff like laser beams, extra lives and if they manage to get 1000 coins, a space ship! This was a bit of a game changer (excuse the pun) - my kids just loved collecting the coins to try to get better weapons!
I wanted the game to be as easy to use as possible, so standard deployment:
- React js app deployed on S3.
- Cloudfront (including a WAF) for distribution.
- Amazon Certificate Manager (ACM) for the certificate.
- Route 53 for the domain name and DNS handling.
- AWS Bedrock for trying out image asset generation.
I wanted it to be very easy to maintain and run, so that's it! No database, no extra storage (other than using S3 itself for the app), no authentication or user accounts - just go to https://thepinkblur.com and start playing!
I could have added things like Dynamo-DB backed scoreboards etc, but my kids don't care about that - they just want to go to the site and start playing!
And of course - using Amazon Q to actually help me build it!
Initial Ideation & Design

The original Pink Blur (my eldest daughter!) helped out with early design concepts, and the design evolved and changed throughout the project as I got to better grips with how a game like this can be made. More on the design madness later!
This challenge was all about trying AmazonQ - and I basically used it for almost EVERYTHING code related for the game. I installed the plugin for my Webstorm IDE and every single time I wanted to add something, I asked it. Just a tiny sample of the questions I've asked over the two months:
- "I want to build a 2d game using react, how should I go about it?"
- "import settings_icon from "../../assets/images/gameAssets/settings.png"; is not showing up in this.settingsButton = this.add.image(this.game.config.width - 50, 50, 'settings_icon')
.setScrollFactor(0)
.setScale(1.0)
.setInteractive()
.setDepth(1000);" - "gear.beginFill is not a function"
- "I've tried everything, the image looks like its loaded correctly. Can you replace it with a generated settings symbol?"
- "actually, can you replace the Pause button with a "Home" button, that navigates the user back to the Chapters screen (as in the route <Route path="/chapters" element={<Chapters />} />"
- "Actually, scrap that. instead if it's level 3, have the missile "spin" as it travels as normal from right to left"
- "if (this.level === 8){
//game complete for now
} I want an overlay that says "Congratulations, Game Complete - for now! Come back soon when we add more levels"
For that last question, here's the actual answer it gave me:
Here's how to create a game completion overlay when level 8 is reached:
This code will:
- Create a semi-transparent dark overlay
- Display a congratulations message
- Show a "come back soon" message
- Add a button to return to the chapters screen
- Include a subtle floating animation for the text
You can customize:
- Colors by changing the hex values
- Font sizes and families
- Text content
- Animation parameters
- Button appearance and position
If you're using React Router, you might want to replace the
window.location.href
with the proper navigation method as shown in the previous response.That's a lot of detailed code, and it worked!
Overall impressions of AmazonQ
It's amazing. I've used other GenAI tools for coding before, and loved them aswell, but I've never had one embedded in my IDE - the panel is just there to the right and it's so simple to just ask anything you need. I basically knew zero about making a 2D game, and it walked me through it all. Any feature in the game you can spot, I asked AmazonQ how do it:
- The animations
- The "coin system"
- How to restart levels
- How to maintain the state across levels
- How to make an explosion on screen
- How to handle collisions and physics
and much more!
Cost
I wasn't totally clear if it was costing me anything, after I'd set it up, so checked my AWS account a few times to see! Turns out is is free - more details here https://docs.aws.amazon.com/amazonq/latest/qdeveloper-ug/q-in-IDE-setup.html#:~:text=You%20can%20use%20Amazon%20Q,Amazon%20Q%20for%20Eclipse%20(Preview)
Anything wrong with it?
Nothing crazy. It wasn't always "correct" but only in terms of minor code issues - it generally understood what I meant and gave me a well reasoned out answer. I'm also not completely sure how much context it maintains - sometimes it gave conflicting answers to something it had answered already, but it was easily spotted by actually reading the answers and not just copying and pasting the code straight in!
Amazing for a time-poor developer
One of the hardest things about doing an online hackathon, or indeed any type of "side project" is that if you have a job and/or a family, your time is actually incredibly limited (another favorite quote of mine is "Time is our most precious resource" from Steve Jobs).
I made this game in stolen 5 minutes here and there, and the odd hour late at night. I was coding when I was cooking dinner, when I was giving my youngest his supper, on the train home from work - and AmazonQ was perfect for this. I didn't have an amazingly thought out plan or design, it was very much built on the fly when I'd time, and having the GenAI tool to ask about something I didn't know about saved me from having to try and Google / StackOverflow it.
Here's one thing for us to mull over - I didn't use StackOverflow once making the game!!

Finally - Design Madness
Although this is really a tech blog, it's worth noting the rabbithole of design I descended into! Here's just a taster of the many different variations of image asset generation I went through.



My advice would be try to timebox how much time you spend on GenAI image generating tools as you can literally lose hours to it!
Final thoughts
I've enjoyed every minute of making this game, and using AmazonQ has been a pleasure. You can try the game yourself on a computer web browser (it's not yet mobile responsive) at https://thepinkblur.com/ - remember it's made for kids, but I'll be trying to get it "good enough for adults" as I work more on it!