Peter Levels, a Dutch developer, entrepreneur, and digital nomad who has gained widespread popularity in the indie hacking community thanks to the creation of a number of online projects, spoke about the success of his AI game Fly, whose concept resembles the famous website The Million Dollar Homepage.
Peter Levels, a Dutch developer, entrepreneur, and digital nomad who has gained widespread popularity in the indie hacking community thanks to the creation of a number of online projects, spoke about the success of his AI game Fly, whose concept resembles the famous website The Million Dollar Homepage.
Peter Levels created a flight simulator called Pieter.com Flight Simulator in a matter of hours using the AI Cursor editor and a few quick prompts and tweaks. He was impressed with the experience, even though the game itself was relatively simple compared to what was already on the market.
«I had never made games before, and I just built my own flight simulator 100% with Cursor in 3 hours, just telling it what I wanted», — Levels told X (Twitter).
First, he added shootable balloons, collapsing buildings, and made the simulator compatible with mobile devices—all with Cursor. Then he added the fast-paced and blank screen style of Grand Theft Auto, and removed duplicate features with ChatGPT.
Levels eventually enabled multiplayer, but said he couldn’t figure out how to make hits count and allow for dogfights between players. With some help from other X users, he built a WebSocket server from scratch using Elon Musk’s Grok-3 AI model. At its peak, the server was serving nearly 2,000 players simultaneously.
xAI CEO and X owner Elon Musk noticed and commented on Peter Levels' game, making it visible to the billionaire’s audience of 219 million followers.
«Wow, this is cool. AI games are going to be massive,» Musk wrote. In response, Levels added Mars to the game, as the SpaceX founder is obsessed with landing humans on that planet.
✨ A new record of 31,000 players online today at https://t.co/6TyHKaj8lb
— @levelsio (@levelsio) March 10, 2025
✈️ ~50 players online at all times
💸 Revenue update: $72,000/mo
📊 Stats update: 296,000 people have now flown in the game
VERY cool news: a BIG new sponsor, and the first non-tech one,… https://t.co/hF3SAFsJQ9 pic.twitter.com/a8jmlZvQCF
While Levels' simulator demonstrates the potential of AI tools to create functional gaming experiences, Pieter.com Flight Simulator lacks depth and unique mechanics. This is understandable given the development tools and the developer’s own lack of game development experience, but it hasn’t saved the project from criticism.
«I’ve never felt more confident about my prospects as a senior engineer. It’s great for a quick prototype. To make it user-friendly for many players, it would take 100-1000 times more effort and more lines of code,» said senior full-stack developer Max Yankov.
Peter Levels is known for his minimalist approach to business, where one of the means of development is complete independence in creating and supporting products. He actively shares his experience through his blog and social networks, inspiring many developers and entrepreneurs to work on their own projects according to the indie hacking principle.
One of his goals is to become the first solo developer to reach $1 million in annual revenue from his products alone, and he’s already getting close to that goal. To monetize Fly as well, Levels has decided to sell advertising space in his game, similar to The Million Dollar Homepage.
This website was conceived in 2005 by Alex Tew, a student from Wiltshire, England, to raise money for university. The homepage consists of a million pixels arranged in a 1000 × 1000 pixel grid; links to images on it were sold at $1 per pixel in 10 × 10 blocks.
Buyers of these pixel blocks provided tiny images to be placed on them, a URL to which the images linked, and a slogan that would be displayed when the mouse cursor hovered over the link. The website’s goal was to sell all the pixels in the image, which would bring its creator a million dollars in revenue.
On March 12, Peter Levels said that in 17 days, 320,000 people played his game, and profits from banner ad sales reached $87,000. The game’s popularity was contributed by Levels' more than 600,000 followers on X (Twitter) and attention to the project from Elon Musk, which attracted advertisers.
«One bad (or good) thing is that this project started completely unexpectedly, and it happened right when I was traveling with my employer to France and Switzerland. I didn’t want to lock myself in a room all day in front of my computer, so most days I just spent having fun with it (as I should), and in the evenings, when I had an hour (like now), I would get together and do everything quickly», — Levels said.
According to him, the project wouldn’t exist if he had programmed without AI, as it would have taken too much time and would have been «10-100 times» longer. Levels added that he continues to use Cursor to work on the game and is testing Anthropic’s Claude 3.5 and Claude 3.7.
