How I built LennyRPG

When Lenny released his full podcast transcript archive, Ben Shih a non-technical designer at Miro — built LennyRPG: a Pokémon-style RPG where you battle podcast guests with product trivia. In this episode, Ben walks through the exact six-step workflow he used to go from sketch to shipped game, including the tools, prompts, and decisions at every stage, along with the broader lessons he learned along the way.

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In this episode, you'll learn:

• How to have AI interview you instead of writing the PRD yourself

• When to pivot your framework, rather than force the wrong tool

• How to systematically process 300+ transcripts into game data

• Three core lessons Ben learned from building LennyRPG

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References

Ben Shih: https://www.linkedin.com/in/hbshih/

Brian Balfour: https://www.linkedin.com/in/bbalfour/

Claude Code Awesome Skills marketplace: https://github.com/ComposioHQ/awesome-claude-skills

LennysData.com: https://lennysdata.com/

LennyRPG: https://www.lennyrpg.fun/

Lenny's Product Pass: https://www.lennysproductpass.com/

OpenGameArt.org: https://opengameart.org/

Phaser 3: https://phaser.io/

RPG-JS: https://github.com/RSamaium/RPG-JS

Supabase: https://supabase.com/

Wispr Flow: https://wisprflow.com/

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About

Welcome to Lenny's Reads, where every week you'll find a fresh audio version of my newsletter about building product, driving growth, and accelerating your career, read to you by the soothing voice of Lennybot.