ChatGPT can actually play an impressive amount of games, but it can also code them with you. You can play some of the classic games straight off the bat, or the AI can take on new storylines and produce games tailored to you with detailed characters, graphics, and images. You can even describe your game idea to ChatGPT and, with some guidance, spin up a working web app to play.
I’ve been interested in AI games for some time, and I’ve built up a collection of prompts that can be played as AR or easily adapted. I’ll show you some of the games that ChatGPT is good at, give you some that you can customize yourself, and show you how to make your own browser game from scratch, all with no coding.
Stick around until the end, and I’ll let you know how to get hold of all the prompts found in this video.
I’ll split the games in this video into what I believe are the four main categories:
- Text games played out in the chat itself
- ASCII games using symbols to make graphics
- Games with generated AI images
- Role play games that allow you to play detailed custom storylines and interact with characters tailored to you.
Finally, I’ll show you browser games you can actually get ChatGPT to write code for and then play.
Let’s get
The first type of game to show, and definitely the most basic, are text games. ChatGPT is incredibly good at guesswork games like 21 questions, where it can figure out any object you have in mind by asking a series of yes or no questions. You can even swap roles and get the AI to pick an object and give you clues until you figure it out. You can also play around with quizzes completely tailored to your chosen topic and length.
But how can we make the games more detailed, interactive, and fun? Well, we can do that by getting ChatGPT to accompany the text with graphics. In doing so, we open up a lot of possibilities. We can create turn-based board games like snakes and ladders or a good game of naughts and crosses. We can also play battleships or have a round of chess.
If we want, we can even try our luck at a game of our own custom slot machine, finding out just how high we can get our own balance. Now, it’s worth noting that ChatGPT isn’t a great artist, so while the ASCII games can be fun and interactive, it’s not quite the same as playing games that have something more to look at. But what if ChatGPT could include AI-generated images?
With the use of a custom URL to generate an AI image in the chat, we can do exactly that. This process of adding images first came when someone on my Discord shared a game where you escape a maze. The game was pretty fun, with the user choosing the direction to head in and the AI describing each room, giving hints as to where to head next. I wanted to play with the prompt and expand on it, and after adding some RNG to give the user a chance of actually escaping, I wanted to try and generate an image of the room itself. The result was a description of our current location that could be fed perfectly into generating an AI image, adding a whole level of detail to what was already a fun game.
But this isn’t just limited to mazes. Most text games I play around with now include images. For example, I made an Escape from Tarkov-style game, where you’re dumped in the middle of the map. The AI would describe where we are, and then we can loot our surroundings and attempt to make an escape with the accompanying images that are actually accurate. The game works well, and I also improved it by using symbols to represent our backpack and keep track of the items we loot along the way.
Adding images is pretty simple. We get the AI to write a descriptive prompt and then feed this into an image generation URL. In my document, I’ve included the prompt that you can simply copy and paste into your own one. As you can imagine, this can be done for all sorts of topics and games, meaning we can make games more immersive and visually appealing.
If you want something more interactive, then ChatGPT is amazing at character role play. You can make Sim games that focus on social interactions and forming relationships as part of an ongoing narrative. These games can be coupled with images to give a face to the characters you’re talking to. It really is limited only by your imagination.
To make role play games, we simply have to give the AI some details: a brief of the game, what happens each turn, how the AI should act, how the user will act, and how the game can progress. With a few instructions, almost anything can be turned into a ChatGPT game.
But let’s not forget about actually coding games. Impressively, ChatGPT can write web app games in minutes. The quality often comes down to how detailed your explanation of the game is, but straight off the bat, the AI can spin up basic working versions of games that already exist. For example, with a small prompt, I was able to make a decent take on Flappy Bird with placeholder graphics. I could go ahead and adapt this myself to finish the game or continue working with ChatGPT to improve it.
But there are also games that don’t exist, and the AI just won’t know how to make it. For this, you have to sit there and give lots of details if you want to get a decent version. First, explain to the AI what you want the game to look like, what the rules of the game are, what the controls are, and so on. It requires some effort, and you do have to spell out every little detail, but by the end, the results can be amazing with no coding needed.
It’s also a lot of fun just sitting there and chatting with AI, spitting up multiple versions of a game you have in mind. This idle clicker, for example, was made with a single prompt. If you’re looking for any other prompts or games mentioned in this video, you’ll find them in the description below or on my Discord server.
If you enjoyed the content or played any of the games, be sure to like the video and drop a comment. It helps the channel and lets me know to create more content like this. Thanks so much for watching, and I’ll catch you in the next one soon.
