Amazon Q for Developers: From Idea to Play in 5 Hours

Are you dreaming of game development? With AI tools like Amazon Q for Developers, it is easier than ever! The possibilities are limitless, and with AWS services, you can go from idea to production in just a few hours – no coding required. Here’s how I created a memory game in just 5 hours using Amazon Q!

The AWS Game Challenge Hackathon requires participants to build games using AWS, especially Amazon Q, a competitor to GitHub Copilot. It was my first time using Amazon Q and my first time in a hackathon. I was amazed at how quickly I could create something playable with its help, showcasing the power of AI and cloud technology.

Learn how I built my game, and get inspired to start your journey!

The Q understood what I wanted well, but for some reason, it gave me a code in Python, which I guess will work, but Python is not my preferred language, so I gave a couple of clarifications and got a code for the Angular/HTML/CSS game.

Interestingly, in addition to a code for a game, it gives me instructions on how to create a new Angular project, which is a nice touch.

I did as instructed, and a couple of minutes later, all the code it suggested was part of my MemQ game.

It’s time to run it and see if that even compiles…👻

I did not expect it would work; it was quite a lot of code, and I had not read it before running; I expected I would fix the mistakes once I tried ‘npm run start’, and it failed with some error, but the game worked!!! 🎉 It not only compiled without mistakes but also was playable; all functionality worked.

The UI looked ugly, but I could play and complete the game for both players. Player 2 won! 😜

Interestingly, even the card’s flip animation worked, which I did not expect.

So now we need to make the game a bit prettier, and I challenged Q with a tricky question; I asked it to style the user’s components like old games in 1980-1990 and see what would happen.

All I have to do is copy/paste the styles. I especially like that the Q understands my context; it sees the CSS styles I already use and gives me just the styles I need to replace, with the same component’s names.
The result looks great, and it’s precisely what I wanted!

Of course, I still have to copy and paste some code myself, so Amazon Q isn’t ready to replace developers yet.

We all can keep our jobs, at least for now! 😊

The result was excellent; all I had to do was create an image from our family trip to Washington using Adobe Photoshop.

Now, I have a fully functional, nice-looking, and playable game with custom images. The only issue is it is all running on my local.

Let’s fix it next.

To tell you the truth, I already know about my options after working as independent contractor with AWS on multiple projects and getting multiple AWS certificates.
Nevertheless, you can’t know it all, and the second option – AWS Amplify, was something I had never heard of and used before.
While option #1 is better for my case, it is more scalable and effective; let’s go with option #2 just to learn a new service.
I tried just to deploy it from GitHub, but it failed; based on the error message, I understand I need to add support for Amplify to the app first.

Amplify deployment is the part that took most of my time.

The biggest issue was I had no idea what I was doing, and my experience with Amplify was 0 (zero).

The second issue is that there are two versions, Amplify Gen1 and Amplify Gen 2, and Q struggled with that; it was pretty common when it gave me the command to run, and it did not work, so it acknowledged that version was incorrect and provided me with the correct Gen2 option.

Anyway, one hour and five deployments later, I got the app successfully deployed to Amplify!

While the hackathon results will be available at the end of January 2025, the results of my time investment are remarkable. I learned a lot and improved as a developer.

• Amazon Q is a good competitor to Github Copilot, especially with AWS-related products. For example, I asked GitHub Copilot for help with Amplify, and I found its answers were not as good as those from Amazon Q. However, the usability for Q is very bad; I can’t put Amazon Q in a separate window on a second monitor, and that drives me crazy because the left side of VS code is used for file navigation and Git. I have to switch between Q and other components constantly.
• Bedrock has a lot of different models that I can spin within minutes. They are serverless, and I charged only when using them, so using large, expensive models is very cheap.
• Amazon Amplify is a new service for me; the idea behind it is excellent: you can manage the front end, back end, authentication, database, and domains from the same place. I feel like, eventually, that would be a default place to deploy apps. However, the implementation for Amplify is rather bad; you need to change your app to add support for Amplify. Gen 1 and Gen2 versions are incompatible, and Q is confused about which one I use all the time, so deployment was a very painful process.