I cannot write game code. Truly, not a line of it.
And yet a little while ago I published a game: a blocky, voxel-styled 3D shooter you play in a browser. The opponents are AI bots. They path around obstacles instead of walking into walls, the recoil is something you can feel, headshots have their own feedback, and there is a leaderboard and unlockable progression. A friend opened it on their phone, played for half an hour, and asked me the question that made the whole thing worth it: "You made this?"
Yes. And the only thing I did, from start to finish, was talk to an AI well.
Not "build me a shooter" — something much more specific
Asking an assistant to "build me a battle royale" gets you a pile of code that does not run. What worked was treating it like a very fast, very capable intern who needs direction:
- I gave it references — a screen recording, a link — and let it work out what I wanted instead of describing it in prose.
- I fenced in the constraints before anything got built (no backend on the target platform, assets must be commercially licensed).
- I asked for one small thing that runs, not a whole game in one shot.
- When something broke, my feedback was specific — which action, what happened, plus a screenshot — and I made it find the root cause in a verifiable way instead of guessing.
- Then round after round: tune the feel, close the loop, make the opponents smart, optimize, ship.
How this is going to go
Eight parts, in the order I actually did them: opening move, constraints, minimum playable slice, assets and debugging, game feel, AI opponents, optimization, launch. Every part comes with the two prompts I used: my exact wording on this game, and a version you can point at your own.
You do not need to know how to code. You need to learn how to make the direction clear. That is a skill, it is learnable, and this is what it looks like in practice.
In one lineI can't write game code — but I can point an AI in the right direction. In 2026, that is enough.
The game I built
This is what came out the other end of all of it. It opens in the browser, nothing to download — go and break it.
