But this time it’s not just in the text editor. There’s a frontend.
The Recap
In my previous post I entered a submission on the AWS Challenge which was me testing out AI for the first time in a project setting. That release was a text editor idle game. So I thought, why not try to make something visual?
New Grounds
For this project I wanted to expand and try something everyone knows and talks about — ChatGPT.
Previously whenever I would go on ChatGPT it would be to ask it to make me quick roadmaps to learn something. So instead of me taking weeks to master something based on its guidance, I wanted to see how smart ChatGPT really could be when it came to making a game. Well, I was surprised and impressed.
Oh no, another click your wrist off game
I didn’t know what to expect when I first starting writing the prompt. I didn’t think it would spit me out a working piece of code in Javascript that I could actually run within the program but it did. However, I don’t know Javascript (yeah yeah, I know, it’s powerful and everyone uses it, I should know it, oh well) but I do know basic HTML/CSS (shout out to The Odin Project and Freecodecamp). So I asked the AI to stick to the basic, bare bones of HTML/CSS as much as possible to see what it could create.
Results
Here’s the start of the game where the player is introduced to the resources they’re able to gather. I didn’t choose the emojis, I said the skill names but ChatGPT has a huge love for emojis and chose them for me. I don’t think anyone can see this emoji 🎯 and not think of ChatGPT these days.
In my prompt I asked the AI to generate the ability for 1 skill to be idled in at a time but I also wanted it to be the players choice. To make the game fun and not pointless I wanted the gathered resources to be spent somewhere and tracked. The task system is also incremental so as the player progresses in the game the task system requires higher amounts of resources to complete each task.
RNG in games might not be for everyone but it is a serotonin boost for many. In this game I asked the AI to implement a pet feature. This feature includes pets that the player can obtain at random while clicking, idle clicking and completing tasks. When the player has pets the click amount generated also increases. It’s to be noted though that pets are included in the task requirements so they will be spent upon task completion.
Bugs – We’re going to need a Costco case of Raid
I encountered a ton of bugs using ChatGPT to create this game vs when I used AWS to create the Idle Text RPG game. AWS in comparison provided smooth results, way less hiccups and didn’t alter code that I didn’t ask to be altered. Here are some of the biggest pain points I ran into making this AI only game with ChatGPT:
- Unasked for content: As said above, the AI would constantly edit portions of my game when I would send a revision for something else. I don’t know how intuitive the AI is in terms of learning from feedback but I made sure to tell the AI each time they edited logic that I never asked to be edited.
- Visual edits: The frontend of the program changed drastically in each revision. I found myself having to send back the full HTML code to the AI and say “Use this as a reference, don’t edit x logic, update only y logic” in order to get what I wanted. This is not something I had to do at all with AWS.
- Code: Many times I had to remind ChatGPT that we were exporting this to be used in HTML/CSS.
- Ignored requests: I wanted the game to format visually on mobile for the viewer to not be immediately turned off by the huge gaps and spacing between different parts of the program. I figured asking ChatGPT to compact the code a bit such as formatting the pets in a way that they were in 2 rows of 2 pets each vs 1 row of 3 pets and 1 row of 1 pet that this would be easy. Instantly proved wrong. This took a total of twelve revisions to complete. I probably could have fixed this myself but this was a AI only challenge.
The Point
I enjoyed this but I think ChatGPT learned more from me than I did from it. Overall though, I found this to be impressive but still a headache in some areas. That’s programming in general though, right?
If you made it this far..
You can have the link to play the game.