Making a Steam game with AI: what the platform actually requires

Steam distributes native desktop executables. Not web builds, not streamed sessions. A game that only exists inside a browser tool is not in a shape Steam accepts, which is why a lot of browser-based game makers are a dead end for this specific goal.

Flockbay builds on Godot, which is an engine that ships commercial PC games. Your project is a real Godot project on your disk, and the app's Export makes a native Windows build from it, an .exe. That is the right starting shape.

Being clear about what this page is not claiming: Flockbay does not upload your game to Steam for you. The app prepares the store page and makes the build. The Steamworks account, the upload, the review and the paperwork are yours.

More on this: What can Flockbay not do?

People who buy a game expect hours from it, and they expect it not to break. That is a much higher bar than a jam game or a demo, and it is worth saying plainly because AI tools make the first thirty minutes of a game very easy to produce and the next ten hours exactly as hard as they have ever been.

The thing that usually kills a first commercial project is not code quality. It is that the game has one idea and runs out of it after twenty minutes. That is a design problem and it is solved by playing your own game a great deal and being honest about when you got bored.

You are the person who does that. Not writing the code or building the world does not exempt you from judging the game; it is the opposite, it is the whole reason you have time to.

More on this: Flockbay is free, AI included: free AI every day, or your own model, with optional plans for more hosted AI.

It starts with a brief. Flockbay asks questions one round at a time, each with a recommendation, and writes down what gets built first, what comes after and what is not in this version. Nothing is built until you approve it.

On Steam the flat games are not a lesser tier: Stardew Valley and Hollow Knight are both sprites. In 2D, Flockbay builds tile ground, where the tiles, the edges and the collision follow from which cells are ground, a band of scenery behind it, and sprites at an exact position, rotation and scale. In 3D it sculpts and paints terrain and adds water, sky, weather, plants, the player controller, characters and props. It writes the GDScript for everything that happens in either — movement, systems, progression, saving, settings menus, all the unglamorous parts that a commercial game needs and a demo does not — and plays the game to check it runs.

Then you play it and say what is wrong, and it changes it against the brief. When the call is pure taste, like where a platform sits or which way a river bends, the same world tools are buttons around the Godot editor's 3D and 2D view, so you can make that one change by hand, and Godot's undo takes it back.

Put the unglamorous parts in the brief. Save systems, options, and key rebinding are the things people skip and then have to retrofit into a finished game, which is much worse than having them from the start.

The game runs locally on the copy of Godot bundled with the app, so you are testing on the same kind of machine your players will use.

More on this: Make a video game with AI: a straight account of how it works

Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux. The app and its world tools are free. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key. Flockbay builds from a library of ready-made objects or with Godot's own shapes, generates pictures and sound, or uses your own files.

Building in Flockbay is free, and so is getting ready for Steam. Under Ship, the Steam page section takes you through everything the store page asks for: capsules cut from a frame of your game, the description, tags, screenshots, price and system requirements. You fill it in or Flockbay's AI drafts it, and it exports as a .zip with a README naming the Steamworks page each part goes on. You upload it in Steamworks yourself, and the build from Ship > Export goes up with SteamPipe. Flockbay sends nothing to Steam and takes no share of your sales. Steam's own fee of US$100 per app is Valve's.

Building needs an internet connection, since the chat, asset generation and world data are network services. The finished game does not.

More on this: What you build is an ordinary Godot project, which is the shape a game gets sold in

Make something small and free first, and let people play it. Not as practice in a vague sense — specifically to find out what your game is like in someone else's hands, which is always different from what you assumed.

Then build the paid one, and build it narrow. A short game that is completely solid sells better than a long one with a soft middle, and it is a project you can actually finish.

Every commercial game needs a settings menu with resolution and volume, key rebinding, a save system that never loses progress, a pause that actually pauses, and sensible behaviour when the window loses focus.

None of these are interesting and all of them are noticed instantly when missing. They are also ordinary code, so they cost you a description rather than a week.

Ask for them early. Retrofitting a save system into a finished game is one of the genuinely painful jobs in game development, and it is entirely avoidable by doing it while the game is small.