Vibe coding a game? Spend your tokens on code, not art

Vibe coding has made the code the quick part. Describe a bubble tea shop to your AI assistant and by the end of the evening you can have customers spawning, a queue, an order system, money and a save file. Then you need the people and the furniture: a cashier who walks in four directions and types at the till, customers who stand in line, carry a cup and sit down, chairs that face the right way. That is where the evening goes, and the token budget with it.

This post counts what the art for one small shop game really is, and makes the case for spending your tokens on the game instead.

What one small shop game needs

Take a single room: a bubble tea shop with a counter, a drink station, a few tables and five people. Here is the art list, counted from our Modern Bubble Tea Shop pack, which is exactly that room.

What your game needs	In the pack
Staff and customers	5 characters (a cashier, a tea maker and 3 customers), 516 animation frames in total
Walking and standing in every direction	16 walk frames and 4 standing frames per character, N, E, S and W
Sitting at the right height for each seat	4 seat heights × 4 directions × 4 frames: 64 sitting frames per character
Carrying a drink	walking and standing with a sealed cup in 3 directions: 15 frames per customer
Staff at work	typing at the till, waving hello, shaking a drink
Talking and moods	talk and talk-idle loops, plus 9 expressions per character (45 in all)
Furniture and machines	30 objects in 41 variants, each in 4 directions: 164 direction images
People in chairs and behind counters without sorting bugs	92 front overlays for seats, staff spots and the door
Things that change state	the cup sealer and the glass door, with every state in every direction
The room itself	walls, floor and a glass door, and 6 tilesets on a 32 × 32 grid

One customer alone is 106 frames. And every one of them has to match the others: the same face from the front and the side, the same height when walking and sitting, the same shirt with a cup in hand.

Where the tokens go when art is on your list

None of this is hard to describe. It is hard to finish. While the art is still on your to-do list, the work tends to look like this:

• Asking again and again for the same character until the side view matches the front.
• Finding out on day two that a pose is missing: the sit-down frames, the back view, the cup in the other hand.
• A character who is a few pixels taller in one animation than in another, so they jump when the animation changes.
• Furniture from one place and people from another, with camera angles that almost agree.
• Working out by trial and error where a seated customer's hips go on a bench.

Every round of that is time and tokens that never reach the game. It is also the part players notice first: a room where nothing quite matches looks unfinished, however good the code behind it is.

The $1.99 shortcut

Each of our packs is one finished, consistent set: the same 32px grid, the same top-down 3/4 camera, the same light and outline, and four directions for everything that faces a way. Each costs $1.99.

Pack	Characters	Objects	Price
Modern Bubble Tea Shop	5 staff and customers, 516 frames, 45 expressions	30 objects in 41 variants, 6 tilesets	$1.99
Modern Convenience Store	4 staff and shoppers, 192 frames, 36 expressions	33 objects in 65 variants, 7 tilesets	$1.99
Modern Hospital	a doctor, a nurse and a patient, 347 frames	104 objects in 172 variants, 9 tilesets	$1.99
Modern Christmas Decorations	Santa and an elf, 115 frames and 9 expressions each, plus festive outfit layers for the 12 characters of the three shop packs	17 objects in 42 variants, 7 tilesets	$1.99

For the tea shop that works out at about 0.4 cents per animation frame, before you count a single chair. And if you would like the simulation side started for you too, our Business Tycoon Game Kit ($4.99) is a working HTML5 business simulation to build on.

Art your AI assistant can actually use

Finished art is only half of the saving. The other half is how fast your assistant can wire it up, and that depends on numbers, not pictures:

• Fixed cells. Every standing and walking frame is 48 × 64 with the feet on pixel (24, 63); seated frames are 48 × 80 with a fixed seat point.
• Predictable sheets. One sheet per animation, rows in N, E, S, W order, frames left to right, no padding.
• Every number in one file. The bubble tea shop, convenience store and Christmas packs come with a GUIDE.txt: frame timings, seat and use points, surface heights, footprints, draw order and a map of every tileset. The hospital pack has the same kind of numbers in its README. Give the file to your assistant and it does not have to guess.
• Front overlays. Seats, counters, shelves and doors come with the overlay that goes in front of the person using them, so characters sit in chairs and stand behind counters without sorting bugs. How the draw order works is in our post on Y-sorting with chairs, counters and overlays.

Pick your pack

Modern Bubble Tea Shop

For a cafe, bubble tea or restaurant game: a full drink station from order to pickup, staff behind the counter, and customers who queue, carry their drinks and sit down. For the game design side, see the order-to-pickup customer flow. See the pack.

Modern Convenience Store

For a store or supermarket sim: shelves in full, partly stocked and empty states, a checkout, fridges and a stockroom, with a cashier who scans, a clerk who restocks and shoppers who carry baskets. See the pack.

Modern Hospital

For a hospital management game: reception, examination, patient rooms, diagnostics, surgery, restrooms and cleaning, with a doctor, a nurse and a patient who sit and lie in the furniture. For room layouts, see layout rules for 32px rooms. See the pack.

Modern Christmas Decorations

For a December update: trees and string lights that twinkle, garlands, gifts, Santa and an elf, plus festive outfit layers for the characters of the three shop packs (sold separately). For event ideas, see Christmas event ideas for tycoon and shop games. See the pack.

Spend the tokens on the game

The part of your game nobody else can make is the game itself: the rules, the balance, the moment the queue gets too long and the player has to choose. Put your evenings and your tokens there. The rooms, the people and the furniture are $1.99 away.