Make It Impressive

Use one prompt to make the game feel more polished:

Polish the game visually while keeping it dependency-light. Add a parallax starfield, colorful player and alien shapes, bullet glow, explosion particles when aliens are destroyed, a title screen, and a cleaner HUD. Keep performance smooth and tell me what changed.

If Codex tries to add too much at once, ask it to split the work into starfield, particles, HUD, then screens.

Choose one advanced feature if time allows:

Add one impressive feature: occasional power-ups that improve shooting for 8 seconds, and a simple boss alien every 3 waves. Keep it readable and avoid large rewrites.

This is where Codex is useful: the feature sounds big, but it can be added in a focused pass.

Finish by asking Codex to test the experience like a player:

Act like a QA tester for this game. Identify the top five issues that would hurt a short classroom demo. Fix the small issues now, and list any larger improvements as future ideas instead of implementing them.

This keeps the project polished without letting scope expand forever. The core game should already be complete; use this module only for the best polish that fits the remaining class time.

At the end, each student should be able to explain:

• Which stack they chose and why.
• The best prompt they used.
• One bug Codex fixed.
• One feature they would add next.

The point is not just the game. The point is learning how to steer an AI coding agent.