In case anyone’s thinking that using AI tools to help create
games is just a case of typing into ChatGPT “make me a game like Tetris, but
better”, it isn’t. (Well, I guess in truth I haven’t actually tried
that, but…) The thing with AI is that the quality of output you get is very much
dependent on the quality of input you give it. Also, don’t expect that you can
get what you’re looking for on the first go – you can try to front-load the
first prompt with context and information, but that will still only get you so
far.
So why did I want to experiment with using AI to make simple
JavaScript games in the first place?
·
I have no interest in actually learning to code
JavaScript – I simply don’t have the time. It took me long enough to learn AGS
script (which is very similar to C++) which means I can usually follow what’s
happening in JS due to similarities in the two languages structures, but I can’t
code it. (I did code HTML many years ago, but really even back a couple of decades
ago, most people were using a visual editor rather than hand-coding it anyway.)
·
I use AI quite extensively in my day job and
have become fascinated by the possibilities. Like most people who have actually
spent significant time learning about and using AI, I see it as simply a tool
that can be used, and rather than deskilling it can be used to help people in
certain professions focus on what their jobs actually should be, rather than spending
most of their time on repetitive documentation tasks. I do appreciate that
there are specific use cases where use of AI is highly controversial – art generation
for instance – and I fully understand that viewpoint.
·
Linked to that, it seems to me that AI has been
trained on coding that has been intentionally made publicly available. My goal
is to leverage the strengths of AI – which is in producing clean, usable
boilerplate code and implementing simple game logic – while avoiding trying to
get it to do anything too complex. That’s where a real coder is still (from my understanding,
at least) miles ahead of what a GPT can do.
·
Given that, I’m using an AGILE methodology – my process
is a very simple three-tiered loop:
o
Think about what I want to achieve on this
iteration
o
Create a prompt that explains this to the GPT as
clearly as possible
o
Test the results, and go on to the next
iteration (unless I feel the game has already reached its target state)
o
This is very small-scale stuff, just me working
with AI, so I’m not bothering with even thinking of anything in terms of “sprints”
etc.
What’s required from me in this case, since I’m not doing any
of the actual coding? Well, first of all, I need the original idea. (My very
first project was a simple noughts-and-crosses game, just as proof of concept,
but my plan is to create some small but unique games.) Then it’s a case of
knowing how to write high-quality AI prompts, and how to give it comprehensive,
clear instructions that are not open to AI hallucinations. Along with this,
understanding how the game should work at a fundamental level is required – if you’re
just remaking noughts and crosses then yeah, no specific knowledge is needed,
but if you want to create something unique, you need to first understand yourself
exactly how it should work “under the hood” and then how to get that across to
the GPT.
In theory, each iteration should take you nearer to the goal.
In practice, I have found that whilst this is usually the case if my prompts
are very precise, there is still room for the GPT to misinterpret what I’ve
asked it to do (the blame for this can be shared between me and the GPT!)
I’ve set certain limitations for myself – I only want to
create something in vanilla JavaScript (with a little HTML / CSS thrown in for
the page design), so no libraries allowed, it must be either a single player or
player vs AI opponent, and it must run within a Blogger post (so I can put it
here along with a short explanation of how the game was designed). I will also
be using only the free Chat-GPT model, and (potentially barring some very small
modifications to the HTML components) not directly editing the code myself.
My goals with this are simply to have a bit of fun seeing what
I can come up with and learn a bit more about the possibilities and limitations
of current free GPT models. I also needed something a little different to
kick-start my brain – with what time I have available, hand-crafting games in
AGS is still my main focus. When all’s said and done, there’s nothing quite
like solving a tricky coding problem yourself!
Okay this post ended up being quite a bit longer than I thought
it would be and I’ve probably missed out some things that had been in my mind,
but anyway… I’ll start posted the results of my experiment soon.
