# Vibe coding a game, and the part vibe coding is bad at

Vibe coding means describing what you want and accepting code you do not read. For game logic that is a reasonable trade. For a world, it is a slow way to get something you did not want. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your own Claude, ChatGPT, agent or API key. It runs on Windows, macOS and Linux, on the official Godot engine.

Source: https://flockbay.com/vibe-coding/ · Updated 2026-10-01

## Vibe coding is good at behaviour

Behaviour. Rules. State. "When the player picks up the lantern, the wolves keep their distance until it burns out." That is a sentence you can say quickly and code you would spend an afternoon writing, and the gap between those two facts is the entire argument for the method.

It is also good at the parts of programming that are tedious rather than interesting. Wiring, plumbing, the fourth variation on a menu. Nobody gained anything from typing those out.

And it is good at exploration. Trying [five versions of a combat feel](/blog/what-makes-a-good-combat-system/) is a different activity when each version costs a sentence instead of an evening. You end up testing ideas you would otherwise have talked yourself out of.

## It is bad at space, taste and code nobody reads

Anything spatial. "Put a ruined watchtower on the ridge to the north, angled so you see it from the valley path" is a slow, imprecise sentence describing a decision you could have made in four seconds by dragging it. Every spatial instruction is a description of a thing you can already see in your head, translated into words, translated back, badly. A flat world does not escape this. "Move that platform one cell left so the jump is only just possible" is a fiddly sentence and about four seconds of dragging.

Anything to do with taste. The density of a forest, how long a corridor should feel, whether a room reads as abandoned or merely empty. These are [judgements made by looking](/blog/how-to-think-like-a-game-designer/), and a text round trip is the wrong instrument.

And the well known failure: a pile of [generated code nobody understands](/answers/can-i-edit-the-code-myself/), where the fifth bug is unfixable because fixing it means understanding the previous four. That is a real risk and pretending otherwise helps nobody.

## Flockbay asks before it builds, and leaves the drag to you

Flockbay writes the code — GDScript, inside your project, where it lives on disk as a normal Godot project. You describe the behaviour, it writes it, you play the game and say whether it is right. That is vibe coding, done deliberately.

The world is not vibe coded in the sense of a sentence and a hope. Before anything is built, Flockbay asks questions one round at a time, each with a recommendation, and writes a brief: what gets built first, what comes after, what is not in this version. Nothing is built until you approve it. Then it builds the world with world tools, as real nodes and resources: terrain, water, weather, buildings and characters in 3D; tile ground and sprites at an exact position, rotation and scale in 2D. It runs the game, sends input events and reads the debugger to check its own work. There is no path where you [describe a landscape and hope](/blog/when-to-stop-prompting-and-start-building/).

And for the four-second decisions, the same world tools are buttons around the Godot editor's own 3D and 2D view. The watchtower on the ridge is a drag, and Godot's undo takes it back. A sentence gets you a ridge; your hand gets you the exact ridge.

The result is that the vagueness stays where vagueness is cheap. A wrong behaviour is one sentence away from being fixed. A wrong landscape is a drag away, not a negotiation.

## You are the one judging it

The loop is: you play, you find what is wrong, you say so specifically, it changes, held against the brief you approved. Not writing the code does not mean not having an opinion. If you have played games for years, your sense of when something is off is well calibrated even when you cannot name the cause.

Specific feedback gets specific results. "The combat is boring" is a shrug. "I can kite every enemy backwards forever and never take a hit" is a fix. Getting good at this tool is largely getting good at [describing what you noticed](/blog/how-to-judge-a-game-you-did-not-code/).

Handing the build back is normal. Nothing about the process assumes you accept the first version.

## You are installing an app with Godot inside it

Flockbay is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, downloaded and installed, with Godot bundled inside it. When you press play, the game runs locally on your machine. There is no browser preview, no streaming, and nothing rendering somewhere else.

[Building needs an internet connection](/answers/does-flockbay-work-offline/), because the chat, asset generation and world data all come over the network. Playing the game you built does not. Flockbay is free, AI included: free hosted AI every day, or your Claude or ChatGPT plan, your own agent, or an API key.

## Questions

### Can I see the code Flockbay writes?

Yes. It is GDScript in your project, which is a normal Godot project on your disk. Reading it is optional and nothing in the workflow depends on it.

### Why can I not just describe the whole game?

You can describe it, and Flockbay will ask questions until there is a brief you approve, rather than hand you somebody's guess at a world. Then it builds that first version. Placement, scale and mood calls you can make yourself with a drag in the Godot editor, whenever a sentence is the slower route.

### Does the generated code become unmaintainable?

It is the standard risk of the method, which is why the code sits in a real Godot project rather than somewhere sealed. Anyone who can read GDScript can go in and look.

### Is this a chat window?

Partly. You talk to Flockbay in a chat dock, and the editor around it is Godot's own, with the Scene dock, the Inspector, the Script editor, and the world tools as buttons around the 3D or 2D view. Most of your time goes on playing the game and saying what is wrong.

### Does it work in the browser?

No. It is a desktop app for Windows, macOS and Linux, and the game runs locally on the bundled Godot.

Download Flockbay free: Flockbay is free to download for Windows, macOS and Linux. https://flockbay.com/

Related: [Vibe coding game jam](/vibe-coding-game-jam/), [Vibe jam](/vibe-jam/), [Cursor for Godot](/cursor-for-godot/), [Godot copilot](/godot-copilot/), [Build a game with AI](/build-a-game-with-ai/), [What is vibe coding?](/what-is-vibe-coding/)