I made a game in a day at an AI coding workshop

Today we had an AI coding workshop at Irvine Systems, run by Davide Pasca, a game developer here in Tokyo who used to work on game engines at Square Enix and really knows his way around AI tools.

Everyone got the same thing to start from: a small top-down shooter, plus a few exercises to build on top of it.

Making it Egyptian

I’m Egyptian, so setting the game in ancient Egypt felt like a natural choice. The original level already had rivers in it, so those became the Nile. You play a pharaoh fighting your way up the river to the temple, past mummies and sphinxes, rescuing captives and collecting cats into a little army that fights for you.

A sandstorm going off among the mummies by the Nile, while the pharaoh and the cat army fight from the bridge

I also added blind spots, like in Among Us. Walls and buildings block your line of sight, so whatever’s behind them stays in the dark until you get there.

Bringing in AI

One of the exercises was to bring AI responses into the game itself. Since the whole game was already set in ancient Egypt, I borrowed from its mythology for this part too: you type a wish, and a council of characters from ancient Egyptian mythology answers it, with every reply written by AI.

Press E and time stops. The council appears in the sky, and you type whatever you want. Most wishes are granted, and about one in ten gets turned down with a joke. Whatever’s granted actually happens in the game: lightning, tombs, portals, mummies turned into cats, even part of the map redrawn.

What surprised me

The whole thing was built during the workshop, with AI doing pretty much all of the work. It was rapid, it was messy, and it was so much fun.

What surprised me most was how good AI was at the game’s look. It drew the art and the interface as SVGs, and honestly, it did a better job than I do in Figma.

It was also my first proper go with Opus 5.5, and it was really good, and faster than I expected.

Trying it

It isn’t online: it was an experiment in how far AI can take game development, not a finished game. The code is on GitHub if you want to run it yourself.