This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by pepper
This is a submission for the World’s Largest Hackathon Writing Challenge: Building with Bolt.
Okay, so here’s the story.
The inspiration
We thought: When we first thought of the word silly, we automatically added the word goose to it. We also loved the idea of an idle game that doesn’t take itself too seriously but still builds on the idea of becoming a TikTok famous goose. Idle games are something that can draw everyone in and make them feel like they are part of something bigger. Not some deep, soul-searching narrative, just a goose, vibing, gaining clout, and maybe sabotaging a few fellow geese along the way. Naturally, we called it Silly Goose Aura.
It started as a joke. But then we started building, and things got serious. And by serious, I mean “multiple repos and 36 million tokens later, I might actually be part goose now.”
The Premise: Be Goose. Get Famous.
You start the game by tapping your goose to generate “aura.”
Aura = influence. Influence = followers. Followers = social media dominance.
It’s basically the circle of internet life, but from a goose’s POV.
The idea was to keep it simple: click the goose, get aura, unlock a TikTok, get more followers, buy and wear new outfits. Let it idle, check back later, boom—your goose is a star.
But we wanted to spice it up. So we added sabotage.
You can mess with other players, slow their progress, send fake bots, and just generally be a chaotic menace.
As any silly goose should.
How It Started (vs. how many times it crashed)
We built it with Devvit, which lets you make Reddit-native apps, and Bolt, which is supposed to be your friendly AI assistant/development tool. We started with the Devvit x Bolt boilerplate code hoping it would make our job easier
The tech stack:
- React + TypeScript + Tailwind (clean, modern, and mostly unproblematic)
- Redis for persistent state (aura, followers, sabotage stats, etc.)
- OpenAI’s SORA for generating goose assets (100 unique outfits for the drip)
In theory: Beautiful.
In reality: Bolt had…opinions.
Bolt, Sweetie, Please
Look. I wanted to love Bolt. It felt like AI pair programming on steroids.
Until it started doing stuff like:
- Randomly deleting files I didn’t ask it to touch
- Refusing to build if a
divlooked at it the wrong way - Swallowing my assets because it thought 3MB PNGs were tasty(???)
- Auto-generating new snippets without me asking
- Breaking message passing and then gaslighting me into thinking the code looked fine
The other big challenge was probably figuring out how to balance the progression system. We wanted the game to feel rewarding without being too grindy, but also without being too easy. Getting the cost scaling right for upgrades was a whole thing – we didn’t want players to feel like they hit a wall, but we also didn’t want them to unlock everything in the first 10 minutes.
Another challenge was making the social media mechanics feel authentic without being too complex. Making a social media app within a social media app is quite a feat.
We even tried integrating Figma assets early on, but Reddit’s Bolt template didn’t support them well. So we ended up prompting it to generate the game from scratch based on the core idea. Once that worked, we replaced the default goose with a custom asset. That part alone took quite a few tokens. In fact, just trying to get proper message passing between components (client and server) like sending the username and score to the leaderboard burned over 8 million tokens. No matter how many different ways I asked, Bolt just couldn’t wire that up right. Eventually, I had to fork and handle the data manually.
Each time something broke (which was often), Bolt would either refuse to build or start cutting random chunks of code by itself. At one point, it even tried to auto-generate a TikTok-style layout, but message passing was broken again. On top of that, assets constantly got corrupted with MIME type errors even though they were all well under 3MB. These assets were crucial to the experience, and I tried everything: uploading them via stackblitz, restructuring folders, nothing worked consistently. That’s where more forks happened, just to roll back to working states.
My Bolt workspace looked like a family tree of broken dreams.
Fun(?) Stats
- Tokens used: ~36 million
- Times I tried sending username and score to the leaderboard: Too many
- Number of times MIME errors received: Enough to start a support group
Things That Actually Worked
Despite the chaos, a few things turned out great:
- The goose is adorable. The outfits slap.
- The sabotage mechanic is way more fun than I expected.
- The vibe is exactly what we wanted: chaotic, satisfying, and weirdly charming.
- Bolt did make coding easier at a lot of places, i.e the main mechanics as well as the databases
The fact that we managed to create something that’s both simple enough to understand immediately but deep enough to keep players engaged for a while is something we’re definitely proud of. It’s giving “easy to learn, hard to master” energy.
What we Learned (Besides Goose Lore)
Idle games are weirdly complex.
You can’t just make numbers go up—you need curves, milestones, and a sense of reward.React state management is no joke.
When everything updates constantly, you need a tight data structure or you melt the UI.AI-assisted development is powerful but unpredictable.
Sometimes it’s a lifesaver. Other times it’s like coding with a sleep-deprived raccoon.
What’s Next
We’re turning this from “fun little hackathon game” into a full goose lore arc.
- Why is the goose famous?
- Is it a scandal? A saga? A redemption story?
Also, we own sillygooseaura.com and we’re planning to expand there with more content.
More sabotage mechanics? Yes.
More outfits? Absolutely.
More existential goose questions? Probably.
A few final thoughts
Would I do it again? Absolutely.
Will I cry if I have to fork one more Bolt repo? Also yes.
This project was chaotic, hilarious, and occasionally cursed—but I wouldn’t trade it for anything.
Except maybe a working build on the first try.
Give it a try :
here
Thanks for reading. May your aura rise and your goose stay silly.
This content originally appeared on DEV Community and was authored by pepper