Create a game with AI, and keep the part that makes it yours
By Eduardo Orellana · Updated
AI is very good at building a game and not good at deciding what the game should be. Flockbay splits the job along that line: it builds the world and writes the GDScript from a brief you approve, and you judge the result. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your own Claude, ChatGPT, agent or API key. It runs on Windows and Linux, on the official Godot engine.
AppImage, x86_64. Ubuntu 22.04, Debian 12, Fedora 39 or newer.
Intel or AMD Chromebook, with Linux turned on.
The version of this that does not work
The common pitch is a text box. You type a description, something appears, and you type again to fix it. It demos beautifully and it stops being fun about twenty minutes in, when what you want is "that tree, two metres left" and the only instrument you have is a paragraph of English.
The problem is not that the model is weak. It is that description is the wrong interface for the last metre of a spatial decision. Nobody arranges a room by writing a memo about it. The moment your world has a hundred objects in it, saying which one you mean costs more effort than moving it would.
So the useful question is not how much of the game the AI can generate. It is what happens before the generating, and what you can still do with your hands after it.
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The building is the part a machine should do
Writing GDScript is a skill, it is learnable, and it takes months you may not want to spend. Sculpting terrain and placing a forest are skills too. Given world tools rather than a blank scene, a machine can now do both from a plan: a brief it works out with you, one round of questions at a time with a recommendation for each, which you approve before anything is built.
Flockbay builds the world and writes the code inside your own project. Terrain, water, sky, weather, the player controller and props; the enemy that hears you before it sees you, the inventory, the day that turns into night, the door that needs the key you have not found yet. Then it runs the game, sends input events, reads the debugger and captures the viewport to check what it made.
The code is visible. It is a normal Godot project, so a person who reads GDScript could read it. You are not required to. The expectation is that you play the game and tell Flockbay what is wrong with it, which is a judgement anybody who plays games can make.
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The verdict is the half you do
You play it. In 3D you walk the terrain, the lake and the buildings; in 2D you run the ledges, where the tiles, the edges and the collision follow from which cells are ground. The reason a place feels good to walk through is a hundred small choices that nobody can specify in advance, and you find them by playing, then saying what is wrong.
Some of those choices are faster to make than to describe: that tree, two metres left. For those, the same world tools are buttons around the Godot editor's view, so you make the change by hand and Godot's undo takes it back. A sentence gets you a valley; your hand can get you the exact valley. This is not a consolation prize. It is the part where a game becomes a specific game rather than a competent generic one.
The two paths are separate on purpose. Flockbay builds. You use the same tools by hand. There is no hidden third path where you ask and something quietly rearranges your world behind your back.
More on this: AI 3D game generator: two kinds of generation, and the verdict is yours
Where the game actually runs
Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows and Linux. You download it, you install it, and it brings its own copy of Godot. When you press play, the game runs on your machine, at your framerate, using your memory. No streaming, no render queue, no browser tab.
That is what makes a real world affordable. A scene with terrain, weather and a lot of moving characters is not something a browser tool can hold, which is why browser tools keep steering you back to whatever fits in a tab. The ceiling there is memory and framerate rather than dimensions: a flat game with a few hundred things moving at once meets the same wall.
Building needs an internet connection: the chat, asset generation and world data all come over the network. Playing what you built does not.
More on this: Open worlds are a scale problem before they are a design problem
What the first week looks like
Get something you can play on day one: a brief for a character, a small space and one thing to do in it. Play it. It will be worse than you imagined and that is the useful information you came for.
Then iterate in the direction of the thing you liked. Ask Flockbay for the behaviour you now know you need, and move the world around it, with a sentence or by hand. The loop is short because the game is running locally and you are the one deciding whether it is right.
Questions
- Does the AI make the whole game on its own?
- No. Flockbay builds the world and writes the code from a brief you approve, and plays it to check it runs. You decide whether the result is any good. A tool that claims to produce a finished game from a sentence is describing a demo, not a game.
- Do I need to be able to read the code?
- No. It is there if you want it, because your project is an ordinary Godot project, but the working loop is play, judge, ask for the change.
- Is it free?
- The download is free, and so is the AI. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.
- Can I use it offline?
- You can play what you built offline. You cannot build offline, because the AI, asset generation and world data come over the network.
- Which engine does it use?
- Godot, which is open source and ships with the app. Your project is a real Godot project rather than a file only this tool can open.
Related
- Make a game with AI
- Build a game with AI
- AI game engine
- Describe a game
- No-code game engine
- A no-code game maker where the code still gets written
- Chat to game, and the part chat is bad at
- Text to 3D game: the part text is good at, and the part it is not
- Can AI make a game?
- Can AI make a 3D game?
Free to download for Windows and Linux. Approve the brief, let Flockbay build, and judge what it made.
Download Flockbay free