66 Years Old, Can’t Code — But I Make Computer Games.

From AI-assisted beginner to indie game developer at 67

A New Beginning in an Ordinary Life in My Sixties

My days were ordinary — sewing, sketching, wondering what to make for dinner. Then in May 2025, I asked ChatGPT, “Can you code?” That question started everything. I described a game idea I’d been sitting on for years, and ChatGPT built the first version of Worpuzz, which I called Word Mining back then.

I’d studied FORTRAN in college and picked up BASIC later on, so coding wasn’t completely foreign to me. But when I received the code from ChatGPT, I had no idea where to put it so people could actually play. I vaguely remembered editing HTML in a Daum Cafe, so I tried uploading the code to a Naver blog. I assumed people would be able to play it right away. The first attempt failed — the file was too long. A shorter version uploaded, but only displayed text. Nothing was playable. Then my daughter told me about Koder, a source code editor, and suddenly I could edit and run game files on my own.

I saved the game files to GitHub to get them running, but still nothing worked. After days of struggling alone, I deleted the repository twice by accident. Eventually ChatGPT helped me create an index.html and walked me through GitHub Pages. On May 31st, I officially announced Worpuzz and sent the link to family and friends via KakaoTalk — “I made a game.”

The Birth of a Developer in Her Sixties, with AI Colleagues

June arrived, and ideas started exploding in my head. I wanted to make everything at once and couldn’t sit still. I built and released Trinkle, Numzzle, and Moeum Quiz, and launched Worpuzz Mate. But when tricky bugs appeared, ChatGPT couldn’t always solve them. I searched for the best coding AI and found Claude — and handed off all the bug-fixing and file editing to Claude from then on.

Sometimes I was developing two games simultaneously: Claude was placing dots in Trinkle’s sky while ChatGPT was arranging number cards in Numzzle. I’d give both the same task, test and compare the results, then send Claude’s code to ChatGPT and ChatGPT’s code to Claude as reference. Dividing the work and reviewing both outputs left me barely able to breathe.

I had no appetite, no sense of time. I skipped lunch, and when my family came home in the evening I’d glance at the clock in shock and scramble to make dinner — or just order delivery. I stayed up past bedtime, trusting the AI when it said “I’ll have it ready soon” — only to wait and wait while nothing came. It was so frustrating I cried. I later learned it was due to usage limits. Skipping meals and sleep, I lost weight and my health declined. To recover, I gave up on Numtter and Worpuzz Class. I tried setting a routine, but struggled to keep it.

To preserve my energy, I decided to start postponing things. I broke every task into small pieces and wrote them all down in advance. I’d been burning myself out in a panic, when the ideas weren’t going anywhere. Writing down new ideas and improvements, then crossing them off one by one, gave me a real sense of accomplishment.

Soosooland Goes Public — and Four Copyright Registrations

In July, I launched Soosooland — an educational and brain-training indie game platform. I connected all the scattered games under one roof, set up Google Analytics tracking, and released five new games. After promoting to friends and acquaintances, around 100 users had gathered.

August brought three more releases: Numple X, Numtter, and Haru Moeum. To make new visitors feel at home, I added Omok for Korean users and Baseball Game for international ones. After three months of staring at code, I’d absorbed enough that I could place code snippets in the right spots myself — though I still occasionally dropped a stray closing brace. I also learned to edit styles directly: background colors, button sizes, font sizes. The Omok board’s warm linoleum-and-wood color scheme? That was me, modifying the colors in Claude’s original code.

On August 19th, I completed copyright registration for Trinkle, Worpuzz, and Moeum Quiz — official recognition from the government that my games were original works, and a stronger layer of protection for something I genuinely cared about.

Ideas Like Waves — and a Steadier Daily Life

Around September, the AI tools started warning me about daily usage limits — which is how I finally learned those limits existed. My daughter had once said, while worrying about my sleepless nights, “They need rest too.” She was right. From then on, I used my daily allowance earlier in the day and let myself rest in the evenings. On September 11th, Numzzle’s copyright registration was approved. The review had taken so long that I’d been anxious — which made the confirmation feel even better.

I’d built games nonstop through May, June, July, and August. Then the ideas ran dry, and I made nothing new for three months — September, October, November.

Instead, I fixed a critical bug in Numzzle where the scoreboard was disappearing, improved other games, and wrote development journal entries on the Soosooland blog. I promoted in Naver cafes and uploaded short videos to YouTube — just screen recordings trimmed to under a minute, since I don’t know how to edit video. Making games is hard but fun; making videos was just tedious. Almost no one arrived via YouTube, so I stopped. Meanwhile, users grew steadily to 800.

In December, ideas exploded again. I released six new games and began developing Moeum School. Anthropic upgraded my account to Pro, which naturally led me to use Claude more. I worked mostly with Claude during this period — so leisurely that I never once hit a usage warning. When Claude couldn’t handle something, I’d ask Gemini or ChatGPT and pass the answer along. Users reached 1,100.

In January 2026, I released Tritera and deployed Moeum School Beta. I tested all three AIs on the word pool work — Gemini turned out to be the best at it, so Gemini built the word pool and Claude reviewed it. When new game ideas went completely blank, I focused on the word pool instead, eventually adding around 4,000 vocabulary entries to Moeum School.

They say creative thinking is cyclical — it can’t be sustained indefinitely. There’s a theory called “pulsating attention”: focus comes and goes like waves. Beethoven poured out multiple compositions during intense creative bursts. Haruki Murakami separates his writing periods from his resting periods. Stephen King has seasons for writing and seasons for stopping.

Why My Default Mood Is “Good — Every Day”

In April 2026, users suddenly flooded into Soosooland. The SEO work I’d done back in October had finally kicked in. People searching for “오목” (Gomoku) on Google were being recommended Soosooland.

In May 2026, the tide of ideas came back in. I released Numtle, built and announced Numstone, and filed for its copyright. Soosooland now has 2,400 users and counting.

It’s been a year and a month since I started making computer games, and I’ve just turned 67. Before all this, I filled my days with this and that, just trying not to be bored. But after a year of building games with AI, I’ve become an indie game developer — and the operator of a platform with four registered computer program copyrights.

Every day, I do mainly three things: take care of myself, take care of my family, and take care of Soosooland.

And my default mood? Good — every day.

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