So, there’s a lot of panic in the dev world right now. AI is getting better at creating code, and it’s got a lot of devs asking if AI is going take their jerbs! And, you know, as someone who only codes for a hobby, I thought fuck it! This doesn’t affect me. Let’s make a game with ChatGPT!
Although I am a freelance content writer by trade so… yeah… gulp
The plan was this;
- Come up with a very simple game idea
- Have ChatGPT do as much of the work as possible
- Take credit for everything and run away with all the profit
- ???
- Profit
I figured you can’t get much simpler than a cosy game. That’s not a slight on cosy games or walking simulators, it’s just, you know, they’re pretty straightforward to make.
So, with that in mind, I asked Chat GPT to create me character controller for a simple maze game where the player can’t stop or change direction once in motion.
It didn’t go well, and after about an hour of trying to get ChatGPT to fix its own code, I gave up and fixed it myself.
Then we moved on to level design. By producing a grid of zeroes and ones, ChatGPT was able to make me a small test level. It wasn’t really anything spectacular but it was a start. I then got distracted for the next two hours making the game look prettier.
Realising that I would be hand-painting a metric buttload of levels from ChatGPT into Unity Tilemaps, I asked ChatGPT to create a script for reading the level data from a JSON file and generating each level on the fly.
This also didn’t work. So I fixed that as well.
Now I could import the level data, all I had to do was copy ChatGPT’s output and paste it into a level file and we were good to go. Time to make some levels… only it turns out ChatGPT wasn’t very good at this.
No matter…
How many times…
I tried.
After way more attempts than I included in the video, I gave up on that too. The next task was a narrative element. I wanted my game to be steeped in meaning and emotion… or at least look like it was deep and meaningful. I asked ChatGPT to spit out a bunch of meaningful-sounding epitaphs to accompany each level.
And, you know what, it actually did this really well.
So, in summary, is AI going to steal your job as a game developer? Probably not anytime soon. My job as a content writer, on the other hand… If anyone needs a crappy little cosy game that looks deep and meaningful made for them hit me up will work for food.
