Unlocking the Power of AI in Game Creation

Using AI to Create Games from Scratch?

At this point you might be wondering if it’s possible to create whole games using AI tools. The answer is yes, kind of. Some tools out there that can create and edit entire codebases, but they’re hard to use and you’ll need an OpenAI developer subscription as they use OpenAI’s API. This means using these tools can quickly cost you a lot of money. If you still want to try it out, here are some suggestions:

• Aider
• Smol Developer
• gpt-engineer

Those tools won’t be able to generate art, but you could use them to create simple text-based games like Snake or maybe even a roguelike.
A far better way of going about it is using the tools I described above like ChatGPT and Stable Diffusion and combining the results with your own creativity.

General Tips for Game Development With AI

Now that you have a bag full of tools to play with, I want to share some tips and tricks I found helpful.

First and foremost, don’t be afraid to experiment and be creative. See how far you can go with the tools that exist today and learn their limits. At first, you’ll probably won’t get the exact results you were hoping for, but with practice, you’ll get better at prompting.

Speaking of prompting, here’s a great guide on how to get better results when using LLMs by mastering the art of prompt engineering: promptingguide.ai. Prompt engineering is wording your questions in such a way that the AI understands it better and can follow your precise instructions more reliably.

Next, I want to share a workflow I’m using to create a game using AI in Godot. It’s a choose-your-own adventure style game, in which you talk to characters, interact with environments and solve puzzles.

I have a few tricks up my sleeve to make this process easier:

• I came up with a game structure and asked ChatGPT to write pseudo-code for me.
• For every scene, I asked ChatGPT to create a name, a description and a list of actions with their outcomes.
• I cherry-picked a few scenes and created background images for them using Stable Diffusion.
• For the item icons, I also used Stable Diffusion, with the Game Icon Institute model.
• To generate the dialogs, I used ChatGPT again and reworded them to my liking.

The whole process is a lot of fun this way. It’s easy to have something to look at and play around with in a matter of minutes. For your own games, you can also hire an artist to redo the art once you’ve completed your vision.

Finally, there’s one more tool I want to share to write code faster and more efficiently: Codeium. Codeium is a free AI extension for Google Chrome, VS Code and some other IDEs. It allows you to create and refactor code in seconds, and you can also use it to ask questions about the whole codebase. I’ve been using it for a few months now and I love it. If you do any coding or scripting, be sure to give it a try.

Where to Go From Here?

If you’re anything like me, you should feel your creative juices flowing after reading about all those exciting AI tools! I recommend that you start out by playing around with web-based tools like ChatGPT and Leonardo.ai first to get a feel for it. After that, you’ll want to check out Stable Diffusion and the OpenAI API.

Keep an eye out for more AI-related articles where I’ll delve deeper into how to use some of the tools and techniques I described here.

Key Takeaways

AI is here to stay, and you should embrace it! Here are some concepts to take to heart from this article:

• You should take shortcuts wherever you can as a game developer to get to your goal, and AI is like a hidden highway.
• AI tools can empower almost all aspects of game development without having to give up your own creativity and originality.
• By knowing more about how AI works, you can bend it to your will with the right techniques.

Are you using AI to enhance your game development workflow? Are you planning to use any of the tools mentioned? Be sure to share your thoughts in the forum discussion below!

About the Author

Eric is an IT-specialist and a hobbyist game developer, programmer and scripter. He has been creating games and other projects since the early 2000s. Most of his time is spent playfully exploring new and exciting technologies like 3D printing, virtual reality and artificial intelligence.

He’s the Game Tech team lead here at Kodeco and leads a group of passionate writers and editors that share his love for game development and cutting edge technology.