The emergence of vibe coding and spec-driven development has reignited my excitement for building. While exploring several ideas from a business perspective, I chose to start with Jacado Light and use it as a practical experiment before deciding whether to revive Jacado Games.
The Legendary Jacado Games
The development of the games under the Jacado brand began in 2001, during the early days of mobile development, when J2ME was still considered experimental. What started as a small pioneering effort quickly evolved into a full-scale operation. Over the following years, more than 200 mobile games and applications were developed and distributed worldwide through a network of over 300 companies (primarily mobile operators and content aggregators). This era required working under extreme technical constraints, optimizing every byte, and inventing solutions where no established practices yet existed. It was a formative period that profoundly shaped my approach to software engineering, product design, and scalability.
Casual, Puzzle, and Board Games at the Core
Our creative focus was always clear: casual, puzzle, and board games designed for short, engaging play sessions. Many of these games were inspired by classic mechanics—dice-based casino games, logic puzzles, and timeless board-game concepts. The challenge was not graphical fidelity, but clarity, balance, and replayability. These constraints forced us to deeply understand player behavior long before analytics tools became mainstream. Jacado Light was one of those games—simple on the surface, yet carefully engineered to be addictive, fair, and endlessly replayable.
The 2007 Shift: From Games Back to Teaching
In 2007, the launch of the iPhone fundamentally changed the mobile ecosystem. The economics, tooling, and expectations shifted overnight. The J2ME platform has become very problematic. At that crossroads, I made a deliberate decision to step away from game development and return to what I love most: learning and teaching. I redirected my focus toward training software developers while working with individuals, companies, and academic institutions. For years, that became my primary professional identity, while game development remained a closed chapter from an earlier era.
Jacado Light Rebuilt for the Web
Developing the web version of Jacado Light was a radically different experience from anything in the past. What once required teams of programmers, careful coordination, and weeks of low-level optimization was now achieved with the assistance of small, focused AI agents that effectively replaced most of the traditional development work. The technical difficulty was no longer in writing code, but in clearly expressing intent and making design decisions.
While I initially considered implementing Jacado Light using a strictly spec-driven approach, I deliberately chose the Vibe Coding path. The goal was speed, exploration, and creative flow rather than formal rigor. Vibe Coding allowed me to move from idea to a working, playable version almost immediately, validating assumptions in hours instead of weeks.
As the years pass and AI capabilities continue to improve, this approach becomes applicable in more and more scenarios. Tasks that once demanded formal specifications and heavy processes can now be explored through lightweight interaction, rapid iteration, and AI-assisted execution. Coding itself is no longer the primary challenge. The challenge is deciding what to build, why, and whether it makes sense from a business perspective.
You can find Jacado Light available online on this blog. Just type the ‘J’ letter, and it will show up. Press ‘i’ and you will get detailed instructions.
Today, with AI removing coding as the bottleneck, I am freely exploring ideas from a business perspective—building.
