Make an RPG with AI: systems are cheap now, scope still is not

By Eduardo Orellana · Updated

Flockbay is free on your own Claude or ChatGPT plan. Claude Pro or Max, or ChatGPT Plus or higher, builds a real Godot project in the Godot editor. Claude Free and ChatGPT Free do not run here. More models are optional, a credit reload at API prices. Windows today. The engine is the official Godot release. RPGs are the genre where AI writing the code changes the most, because an RPG is a pile of interlocking systems. It also changes nothing about the reason most RPGs are never finished.

Why RPGs stall

They are systems-heavy. Stats, levelling, equipment, inventory, a turn order or a real-time equivalent, dialogue with branches, quests with states, saving that has to capture all of it. Each is a week of work for a beginner and they all have to agree with each other.

Then they are also content-heavy. Towns, dungeons, NPCs, items, and enough of each that the systems have something to operate on.

The first pile is what stops people who can code a bit. The second is what stops everyone else. AI collapses the first pile substantially and leaves the second exactly as large as it was.

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What Flockbay handles

The systems. You describe them in plain language — how damage is calculated, what levelling gives you, how many item slots there are, what a quest looks like when it is half done — and Flockbay writes the GDScript in your project.

Ask for saving early. An RPG save has to capture quest states, inventory, position and stats, and retrofitting that into a game that already exists is genuinely unpleasant. Having it from the start costs nothing.

Then play and tune. RPG balance is not designable on paper. You will find the fight that is impossible and the item that trivialises the whole middle of the game only by playing it.

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What you build

The world. Towns, interiors, dungeons, and where every NPC stands. This is the content pile and it is manual, because a place is something you make rather than describe.

What you make it with depends on an answer the project asks for before it will create anything: 2D or 3D, shown as two pictures, with no default. Both are real choices and the same chat is behind either one.

On the 3D side, world building is the part where the tool is fastest. Terrain you sculpt, water you outline, weather you set, buildings you place. What would be a modelling career elsewhere is an afternoon here.

In a flat world it is ground you paint. You drag over cells to say which ones are ground, and the tiles, the edges and what the player collides with are all worked out from that, so a road through a village is walkable the moment it exists. Whether a material stops a walker is declared rather than assumed, which is how the same gesture gives you a path and a wall. The town on top of it is sprites placed by hand at an exact position, turn and size.

Assets come from generation, from the web, or from your own files, and on the 3D side simple geometry can be built directly as well. In a flat project the first stop is usually the Catalogue, which holds 60,648 objects of which 55,073 are sprites, searchable by name with a picture of each; Flockbay can make a single flat still image on request too, though not an animated one. You will be told which route was taken rather than left to guess.

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Dialogue and writing

The dialogue system — branching, conditions, remembering what you said — is code and Flockbay writes it.

The actual lines are yours, and it is worth being deliberate about that. Generated filler dialogue is instantly recognisable and it is the fastest way to make a world feel dead. Fewer NPCs with lines you wrote is better than a town of people saying nothing in particular.

Scope, said plainly

The classic first RPG is a sixty hour epic and it is never finished. The reason is not ambition, it is that content does not compress: every town is a town you have to build.

A two hour RPG with one town, one dungeon and a real ending will teach you more and will exist. Build that. If it is good, the second one can be bigger, and you will know what bigger costs.

Practically: Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows, running your game locally on bundled open-source Godot. Building needs an internet connection; playing does not. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.

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Quests, and how they break

Quests break at the edges. The player kills the character who gives you the quest. They find the item before being told to look for it. They do step three first. They leave halfway through and come back an hour later.

Every one of those is normal player behaviour and every one of them will happen. Describing what should happen in each case when you ask for the quest is far cheaper than discovering it later in a save file that no longer makes sense.

The general rule is that a quest should be a state the world is in, not a sequence the player is trusted to follow. Ask for it that way and most of the breakage never appears.

A starting project for this is the RPG game templates. The design note that goes with it is how the Japanese RPG took shape.

Questions

Can it write a turn-based combat system?
Yes. Describe the rules and Flockbay writes the GDScript. Balancing it is done by playing.
Does it write the story and dialogue?
The dialogue system is code and gets written for you. The lines themselves are better coming from you; generated filler makes a world feel empty.
Can I make a 2D or top-down RPG?
Yes, and you say so before anything exists — a new project asks 2D or 3D and will not create until you pick. A top-down RPG is built by painting tile ground, placing sprites where the town goes, and having Flockbay write the same stats, inventory and quests. Top-down rather than side-on falls out of declaring no gravity, which makes the character steer on both axes. What is not here is isometric, so do not plan a game around it.
What about saving?
Ask for it early. It is ordinary code, and it is much easier to include from the start than to add later.
What does it cost?
Free download and free plan. Flockbay is free on your own AI: your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.