Windsurf IDE Review

I just built a fully playable retro-style Dog RPG — complete with animated walking, barking mechanics, digging surprises, angry moles, and a scoring system — using only three prompts in Windsurf, the new AI coding assistant from Codeium. Total real coding time? About 5-6 hours, most of it spent wrestling with pixel art assets rather than fighting the tool.

Watch the full build process here: WATCH ON YOUTUBE – see every prompt, every bug, and how we turned a blank screen into something legitimately fun.

The clean, VS Code-like interface that feels instantly familiar.

Why Windsurf? (And Why Not the Others?)

I've tried a bunch of AI coding tools lately. Antigravity was a disaster — constant token limits killed the flow after a single page. Cursor is solid for debugging. But Windsurf? It feels built for real iteration: no daily caps on the free tier (I never hit a wall), fast responses, and one killer feature I'll get to later.

The goal was simple: start from zero and end with a Phaser 3 game you could actually play. No hand-coding everything — just vibe-coding with prompts.

Prompt 1: The Bare-Bones Setup

First prompt: Spin up a Vite + TypeScript project, install Phaser 3.8.0.1, strip the boilerplate, and create a basic 800×600 canvas with Arcade physics (no gravity) and proper scaling.

One annoyance right away: Windsurf doesn't always auto-apply changes. When it's not 100% confident, it hands you snippets to copy-paste. It's cautious — which prevents disasters — but it breaks flow early on. Still, 30 seconds later: dev server running, blank screen ready.

Prompt 2: Enter the Dog (And the Asset Nightmare)

Prompt 2: Add a dog sprite sheet, create directional walk animations, WASD movement (speed 180), tight foot-level collision, bark on space, dig on E, and scale it nicely.

This is where things got messy. I grabbed a retro dog sprite sheet... and everything exploded. Wrong frame sizes, animations firing before textures loaded, invisible dog. I even threw in an AI-generated sheet for laughs — total disaster.

It felt like 3D printing in 2015: endless calibration, failed attempts, frustration. But once we told Windsurf to dynamically calculate frames from the loaded image and wait for texture complete? Boom — perfect animated pup walking in all directions, snappy movement, bark popup, and dig feedback.

(Off-camera, I enlisted Cursor for the final texture fixes when Windsurf temporarily crashed from too many iterations. Lesson learned.)

Prompt 3: Turn It Into a Real Game

With basic movement working, the game was... boring. Just a dog on infinite grass. Time to level up.

Prompt 3: Add UI with health/stamina bars, a zoomed-out minimap, collectible bones that refill stamina, a main menu for dog tint selection, and real gameplay loops — all in a parallel scene.

Windsurf crushed this part. Health drains while moving, regenerates when idle. Bones spawn randomly with satisfying feedback. Then we kept iterating: screen shake on dig, particle bursts, random dig outcomes (bone, angry mole, geyser, or nothing). Barking now pushes objects and stuns enemies. Moles chase you — bark three times to defeat them.

We hit hilarious bugs along the way: power-ups started as tiny cubes, then became screen-swallowing giants. Moles evolved from red dots to derpy brown blobs with googly eyes.

Not pretty, but weirdly charming — and the loop became addictive.

Add a scoring system, high scores, and suddenly it's a legit little arcade RPG.

Dig for surprises, bark to fight moles, collect bones — simple but fun!

The Magic Feature: DeepWiki

Hover over any Phaser function or your own class in Windsurf, and DeepWiki gives you an instant, plain-English explanation. No more asking the AI for docs — it's a live-updating wiki of your entire codebase. I didn't know I needed this until I had it. Game-changer.

Generous free tier with no hard daily limits — perfect for extended sessions.

Vibe Coding Is the 3D Printer of Software

Nobody's shipping AAA titles purely with AI prompts (yet). But for prototyping? It's unbeatable.

Remember the 3D printing hype in 2015? People thought it'd replace factories. Nope — jammed nozzles and spaghetti supports. But for rapid physical prototypes? Revolutionary.

Same here. Vibe coding lets you throw together a rough game super fast, play it, realize "barking at nothing is lame," then pivot to moles and geysers in the same afternoon. That iteration speed is priceless — and Windsurf nails it once you're past asset headaches.

Verdict: 7/10 (And Climbing)

The Good: Intuitive UI, unlimited free usage, lightning-fast iterations, clean modular code, and DeepWiki is unique and brilliant.

The Bad: The copy-paste dance when it's not confident. A simple "aggressive apply" toggle or better diff highlighting would fix it.

Overall, Windsurf delivered a way better experience than Antigravity and has huge potential. If you're prototyping games or just want to test wild ideas quickly, give it a shot.

The full code is on GitHub — fork it and expand! Who knows, maybe next is a full sheep-herding dog sim. Let me know in the comments if you'd play that.

YOUTUBE VIDEO

Incase you missed it, I made a youtube video covering this whole process, and it turned out pretty great, if you like this, you'll love that. https://youtu.be/_emPzvjnSo0

Thanks for reading — now go build something stupid and fun! 🐶