◆ MAKING THINGS · 2026-07-07

Building a Browser Game with My Son

The Idea Came From Him

My son Xavier wanted to make a game. Not play one — make one. I don't remember exactly how the conversation started, but I remember the feeling: that mix of excitement and mild panic you get when a kid asks you to do something you haven't done before and you don't want to let them down.

I'm a motion designer and a creative director. I've built companies, products, brands. I've worked in drawing, animation, chemistry, code — the medium has always been secondary to the problem. But I had never shipped a browser game. So we figured it out together.

The result is STONK!, a browser game that lives at xavierzak.com. It has a real-time online leaderboard, which was Xavier's idea and turned out to be the single feature that made the whole thing feel real to him. Not the game logic, not the visual design — the leaderboard. The moment he could see his name next to a score that anyone on the internet could see, something clicked for him. That's when it became a product and not just a project.

What I Was Actually Teaching Him

I went into this thinking about craft. About how to think like a builder. There's a set of instincts I've developed over a long career — how to scope something so you can actually finish it, how to ship before it's perfect, how to treat feedback as information instead of judgment, how to iterate without losing the original idea. None of that is taught in school. Most of it I learned the hard way, usually by blowing a deadline or shipping something half-baked and having to deal with the consequences.

Building STONK! gave me a live, low-stakes context to pass those instincts on. When Xavier wanted to add another feature before we launched, I said no — not this version. Let's get it out, see what people do with it, and then decide what to add. That's not a creative principle I could explain in the abstract. But in the moment, with a specific thing we'd built together sitting right there almost ready to go, it landed.

The leaderboard is built on Netlify functions. That's real infrastructure. Real serverless backend code. He doesn't fully understand all of it yet, and that's fine. What he understands is that a decision we made — to let anyone in the world see the scores — required a real engineering solution, and that the solution had to be built and tested and broken and fixed. That's the loop. That's all of it, really.

What He Was Teaching Me

Here's the part I didn't expect. Xavier was fearless in ways I have trained myself not to be.

When you've shipped a lot of things professionally, you develop a filter. You start anticipating criticism before you've made the thing. You hedge. You sand the edges down. Xavier had none of that. His instincts about what was fun were direct and completely unclouded by what he thought other people would think. He just knew. And when I second-guessed something on the taste side — the feel of a mechanic, a visual choice — he was usually right and I was usually in my own head.

That's a real thing children give you, if you let them. They haven't learned to distrust their own taste yet. Watching him work reminded me that the filtering reflex, the one that keeps professional work polished and safe, can also keep it from being surprising. Some of my favorite work over the years — whether that was something I animated, or an early product decision at ArtResin, or a weird creative direction I pushed a client toward — came from ignoring that reflex. Xavier doesn't have to ignore it. He just doesn't have it yet.

Creativity Is What Runs in This Family

I've been making things my whole life. The mediums keep changing but the impulse is the same. My brother Ryan is a classical composer — we grew up in the same house, came out of the same family, and ended up in completely different corners of the creative world. But the underlying drive is identical. You see something that doesn't exist yet and you want to make it exist.

Xavier has it too. I can see it. Not just in the game — in the way he approaches problems generally, in the questions he asks, in the fact that "let's build something" is a natural sentence for him to say. That's not nothing. That's actually everything.

If you want to know more about the arc of my own creative life — the drawing, the animation studios, the resin company, all of it — the bio page has the fuller picture, and the timeline traces it year by year.

STONK! is live. Go play it. Put your name on the leaderboard. Xavier will see it.

My client and commercial work lives over at davidzak.com if that's what you came here looking for — but this kind of project, the personal stuff, the building for the joy of building, is what this archive is really about.

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