Game vibe coding
Game Vibe Coding
You bring the taste — what the game should feel like. The AI handles most of the implementation. Both jobs are real work.
'Game vibe coding' is an awkward phrase, but the question behind it is the one I actually get asked: what changes when AI writes most of the code? In my experience the human role shifts toward creative direction. You decide what the game is, what feels right, and what to fix next. The agent handles the boilerplate, the gameplay systems, and a lot of the polish.
What doesn't change: you still have to play the build. Every pass. The clip-driven YouTube version of this hides a lot of small 'no, smaller' and 'no, slower' prompts that don't make the final cut. The skills and source projects in the pack are what let those small prompts land — without them, the agent guesses too much.
Why It Matters
- Public game source — Phaser Oakwoods, Castle Clash Duel, Forest Census, the pirate brawler
- Skills covering engines, asset pipelines, testing, and Capacitor iOS deployment
- Prompts that read like the ones I actually use — not pretty paraphrases
Workflow
Be the director
Pick the genre, camera, player verbs, art direction, and what the first playable minute proves. You're not writing implementation — you're writing the brief the agent will work from.
Hand the agent its operating manual
Engine skill (phaser-gamedev, threejs-builder, love2d-gamedev). Asset skill if you need sprites (retro-diffusion, animated-spritesheets, gpt-image-1-5). Source repo to imitate. Now it can build.
One observable change at a time
Blank repo → loop. Loop → feel. Feel → feedback. Feedback → polish. Each pass ends with you playing the result and naming the next change.
Public Vault Excerpts
Agent skill
phaser-gamedev
A Phaser 3 workflow skill for scenes, sprites, Arcade and Matter physics, tilemaps, animation, input, and game architecture. Use it when a browser game needs real game-loop structure instead of generic React-style code.
- Phaser
- 2D
- Browser games
Agent skill
threejs-builder
A Three.js skill for scene setup, camera and renderer wiring, lighting, geometry, materials, animation loops, GLTF loading, responsive rendering, and performance guardrails.
- Three.js
- 3D
- WebGL
Project
Castle Clash Duel
A public Phaser 3 tactical strategy game using Tiny Swords pixel art. The useful lesson is not only the source code: it is the turn-based combat loop, sprite animation handling, and AI-assisted iteration pattern behind the build.
- Phaser
- Strategy
- Pixel art
Project
Forest Census
A public Three.js mini-game built with Codex CLI and the threejs-builder skill. It is a compact example of a single-scene game that can be hosted statically and improved in small AI-assisted passes.
- Codex
- Three.js
- Mini-game
Agent skill
retro-diffusion
A pixel-art generation workflow for spritesheets, img2img edits, walk cycles, idle loops, attack sheets, and animation consistency from reference images.
- Pixel art
- Spritesheets
- Animation
Agent skill
animated-spritesheets
A workflow for turning a single character reference into an animated spritesheet through frame recovery, background cleanup, normalization, contact sheets, and GIF previews.
- Characters
- Motion
- Pipeline
Playbook
The Full AI Sprite Pipeline
A public-facing playbook path from image generation to video reference to a Phaser test harness, showing how game-ready character sprites come from a repeatable pipeline rather than one lucky prompt.
- GPT Image
- Sora
- Phaser
Prompt Patterns
Get to a playable loop before anything else
Before adding levels, content, or art, get one playable minute working. Movement, one interaction, one way to win or lose. Use the existing engine conventions in this repo — don't reinvent scene structure. Add a small debug overlay for anything I'll need to tune (speeds, hitboxes, spawn rates).
One system per pass
Change only one system. Tell me: what the current behaviour is, what we're aiming for, which files you expect to touch, and how I can see the difference in the running game. If you find yourself wanting to touch a second system, stop and ask first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Do I need to know how to code?
No, but you do need to direct. You're deciding what the game is, what feels right, and which problem the agent should fix next. If you've never coded, AI removes the blank-page friction. If you've coded for years, AI cuts the boilerplate. Different upside, same workflow.
What makes games harder than AI-coding an app?
Feel. A web app is correct if the data flows. A game is correct if it feels right when you play it — and that's a different review process. Animation timing, collision tuning, audio cues, difficulty curve all interact. You have to play the build, not just read the diff.
What's a sane first project?
One mechanic, one engine. A Phaser arena where you dodge things. A Three.js scene with collectibles. A Love2D mobile toy that uses one finger. Ship the loop before you scope up — the first version of the pirate beat 'em up was 'duck, weave, swing,' nothing more.