I’ve been making and releasing games on and off for I’d say 10–15 years. Feedback use to at all times come from friends and colleagues which might not at all times be the form of feedback I’d be in search of. I got here into pico-8 with the choice to only make games for fun but I still have this itch of wanting to do it fulltime. I’ve spent near a 12 months developing a few of my games and this time I just desired to keep on with something easy in order that porting would hopefully even be easy.

I got here up with an idea for a spot fitting game. So I though I’d see how ChatGPT could help me. I’ve tried using GPT 3.5 to assist with game coding before nevertheless it wasn’t that good. So I signed as much as ChatGPT plus so I could use the brand new GPT 4. That is the starting prompt for my game (ignore that it says GPT 3.5 at the highest I switched to the model later as my GPT4 allowance had ran out)

Sadly things didn’t start so well:

So what I did is break down the prompts into smaller tasks and edit the code I could see was flawed. ChatGPT doesn’t really know Pico-8 Lua so numerous errors were right down to this. Once I had the core concept near working I moved onto coding it myself. I find ChatGPT is useful in the beginning but can eventually change into a hindrance, especially on the subject of game coding. I released the initial prototype on itch https://anefiox.itch.io/perfect-fit-pico-8 in order that I could get some feedback.

After some positive feedback off that. I assumed I’d try the sport in one other small community to be sure that it wasn’t a fluke. So I went for the Playdate console and released that on itch https://anefiox.itch.io/perfect-fit. This time I had positive feedback and was featured on a podcast. I didn’t use ChatGPT to assist with this because it didn’t appear to know what the Playdate SDK was. Luckily additionally it is in Lua and the port was not that difficult.

So I assumed okay, I’d wish to port this to mobile. I selected Unity as my engine as I had never developed in it and at all times desired to do a release with it . I assumed I proceed in the identical chat and see if ChatGPT could help me with the port. That is the way it began:

Unlike Pico-8, Unity has numerous UI that must be used to create objects and link bits together. ChatGPT was really helpful with the code and I feel it’s a lot better at C# than it’s Lua. I still had to interrupt down tasks for it and sometimes the code it provided was completely flawed. It just shows that to make use of current AI effectively you wish little bit of domain knowledge yourself.

I didn’t actually mind coding in Unity but construct process on Android and iOS were only a nightmare. I’ve finally managed to get releases out for iOS https://apps.apple.com/tt/app/perfect-fit-block-drop/id6449626297 and Android https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.anefiox.PerfectFitBlockDrop

I’m now considering why don’t I port it to something else. I can probably do a release to Steam or the Xbox quite easily but I’d must change the aspect ratio of the sport. Or I used to be considering I could go for something more obscure just like the Arduboy or perhaps create a Nes rom.

I actually have already began making a recent prototype in pico-8 with ChatGPT for an limitless golf game and can proceed to make use of it to assist me.

If you may have any questions or would love more detail on certain areas please let me know.