Can an LLM Make a Video Game?

In the Summer of 1980, I played Asteroids at a gas station in rural West Texas. I stood on a stool to reach the controls and see the screen. Ever since then, I’ve wanted to make a video game. I’ve also wanted to have the time, skills, and resources to make a video game.

- Jason Murphy

In recent years, it’s become much easier to bring your idea to life using tools like Godot or one of the GameMaker engines, even with very little coding experience. That’s all well and good, but in the interests of curiosity and laziness, I want to know if I can prompt a Large Language Model to do it all for me.

My focus is to see just what I can coax out of an LLM to replicate a vintage Asteroids experience. I’m fairly confident I can get assistance with boilerplate blocks of code for most of it. From there, cobbling together the final game won’t be a problem, but with only prompting input on my part, how close can I get? Can I generate entire game elements? Asteroids is a simple game. Can an LLM rebuild it all, tabula rasa?

For this experiment, I’ll try to stick to just prompting and using whatever the LLM provides. Along the way, I’ll take a look at the code. Invariably, inefficiencies are going to jump out at you. You’ll see errors start to pop up as you move forward. You may see the LLM inexplicably change code that was working just fine. But you can’t change it! That’s against the rules. You have to get LLM to do it using plain language requests.

The Plan