ChatGPT for Indie Game Developers: Do's and Don’ts

for example I have another requirement I have a txt file in a specific folder in unity from which I'm loading data in the game for reading words so what is happening why is it happening and how it's happening so that is all mentioned in a single sentence now when I try to make an Android build the game this so this is the problem that I am facing first the process of how things are happening and then the process the problem that I'm facing hey everyone this is Roman from Tangen and today I'm joined by Anu andu please introduce yourself uh hello guys I am anul I am an indie game developer I make mobile games and web games and I also use a lot of a tools like chat GPT D and mid journey to help me in my game development processes right we we annel is also a PR

member of our Discord Channel Roi 101 and an author of the newsletter will leave all the links uh below this video um and this is uh actually a second attempt to record a video about AI tools and the first one like failed miserably because the idea was to develop game G within like 30 minutes or so without without any programming knowledge and something went wrong we like we tried weed we tried and it was already like I don't know one and a half hours of the recording and then chat GPT said like enough is enough too many queries or something like that uh maybe we can start from here so this time we'll uh try to Deep dive uh what not to do when you're making a game with the help of the chat GPT so I don't think

you can make the whole game but you can definitely use it as a helper uh what do you think I know is it accurate uh it is accurate you should always use it as a helper so you know what we tried in the previous video was approaching chat GPT with someone who has no knowledge of unity no experience in programming so what really happened was we asked it a lot of questions about basic things you know that we had to do in unity for example to set up the coding scripts to set up the entire game level game scene um game prefabs for example which is a fair thing from a very beginner's perspective you know if you are a beginner you will have these questions why is this going here why is this going there and chat GPD will explain you that but you know then the conversation gets too long and one of the big problems with all these GPT

tools is it starts to hallucinate after a point if you have longer conversations so it tends to you know get confused and it won't give you as accurate results as it would in the beginning of any chat yeah precisely and I felt like the rabbit hole was too deep uh for me I I was in the role of a person who like doesn't understand anything about program and I had zero foundational knowledge about how to produce a game where unity and CH GPT was always like hey here is an object uh a and you need to put it [Music] in object B and I had no idea what is what right um yeah uh what what about you do do you have uh some uh programming engineering background so I don't have any professional engineering background but but whatever I have learned I have

learned it by myself through YouTube articles tutorials in unity I have been making games in unity for the past five years now mostly hyper casual casual games but uh it has given me a strong grasp on programming uh Logics programming systems processes you know to understand the code logic of how things work in unity outside of unity in different languages so it is fairly easy easy for me now to use a tool like chat GPT because I understand when it mentions something it asks me to do something in unity I can just do it very quickly so yeah knowledge I have a I have I have quite a lot of knowledge in programming games yeah and uh how was it maybe let's take a step back like you've been developing games for five years how was it before the chat jpt or any AI tools that you were using using

so chat GPT and E tools they have been coming in the for the past year now before that it was all manual coding you had to do everything by hand which is fair you know a lot of people still do that even I still do that sometimes for most of the games I work on but uh you really had to Deep dive into a into a programming State into to you know think a lot of about some core problems in the game that you would solve by programming so let's let's take chess for example chess uh if you want to recreate chess for mobile it has different components like you know there is a grid management system there are different pieces and different pieces can only move in certain spots so if you're doing it by yourself you will have to Deep dive into you know how would I code this how would this piece only move on these certain spots how can this Piece Block another pieces path for for example but if you

uh delegate it to chat GPT if you write it in a very technical way in a document like okay this is a game idea maybe not chess maybe it is another board game idea which is similar to chess but if you explain the rules like okay I have five pieces I have five objects and they move like this in the board game can you please code it for me in unity it can do that in maybe you know next 2 three minutes and you will have to do some back and forth conversation give it feedback okay this is uh working but we need to change this and maybe in the next 5 to 10 minutes you could get the perfect result that you want right and that's something actually that we've done in our fail experiment and this part actually worked very well in terms of we just made a screenshot of the game description from the App Store and uploaded it to chp4 and I think this part went very well it understood everything like correctly right yeah so yeah uh like with the new model of at GPT gp4 it can

analyze the images it can understand what is happening and you can do game design mockups you can explain the levels uh the character what kind of movement you want you know maybe the character should jump or it should work using WD keys if you have a good detailed document or image it can easily understand that right um maybe let's jump into some other like use cases you've produced a lot of content around that maybe you can uh share like the most popular as all the ones that you like the most so uh I mainly use it for two two things one of them is to generate icons and logos or even marketing promotional material for games which is very nice very easy you just take them you modify them in Photoshop and you go ahead and you upload it on the Google Play store or wherever you're uploading the the game you can also create icons that you

can use inside of the game like game assets so maybe I can share my screen after uh after this to show you how it works and the best use cases for programming can be specific from game to game but it is mostly the kind of things that you know you can do it but it will take you some while you can do it but it includes a lot of simple logic uh not super complex logic because many of times games are simple the logic is simple but you have to manage a lot of use cases you have to manage a lot of different things in the coding sequence it it can be done by you but it will just take you a little while longer right makes sense and um why do you use specifically chat GPT for creating like visuals and not some like other tools because I I've seen uh

so many startups that are doing like I don't know creative generation whatever call it whatever like is it like an advantage or you just prefer to char GPT because you already have uh everything inside and just more convenient uh mostly because it is very convenient first of all and I'm quite used to it now and all of these other tools on the market I think they they're not very different it's maybe 10 or 15% better less better than chat GPT you can have that conversational feedback with chat GPT you can also upload reference images so you just send an image you ask it to analyze the image the style of the image generate another image in the same format same structure there is also mid Journey the latest version version six which I still have to try it out but I heard it's pretty good it can also generate text and the images are really detailed and according to how you want so so I'm still exploring more more

Tools in 2024 but yeah I think uh I'll stick to these for now I see uh let's jump into the screen sharing part then like please share the use cases okay so uh I had a fruit game in which we had different fruits and these fruits were mostly in the shape of fruits so the fruit game is a very the watermelon game is a very famous famous Trend in Mobile games and the idea is like a very classic 204 ball dropping games of balls mge together and they evolve into a better fruit so uh I wanted different shape of fruits but still giving that very fruity feel to it so what I did was I took an image which I already had of a grape and I told this is a grape can you generate me a watermelon of similar Style

so he generated it generated a watermelon for me in a you know Kai style nice sweet I asked it to reduce the kaess to it you know so toned it down a little and okay but I was thinking to have some kind of different shapes now again this is 3D I asked it to produce a 2D image so I asked it to fix it with the flat 2D you know Desco but still keep it cute and produced me a very nice looking image so you can just easily take this in Photoshop remove the background remove the bottom part and you get a nice round fruit which is the core of the fruit games concept having round fruits right and um maybe you can also explain a little bit uh uh the way you talk with Chad jpt maybe

there is also like best practices in here like what are the commands so uh you know there are some uh some uh it's called prompt engineering uh I still have no idea how exactly prompt engineering works but I think it's just giving a very detailed set of instructions to chart GPT how you want some things like I mentioned in this what should be fixed plat 2D reduce this and it should still be kaai you need a 2d not 3D you have to be specific with what you want you have to describe the uh requirements so if you know let's say we take some example of the game okay so for example let's let's take an

example here okay so I'm talking to it hey hey hey hey so I am explaining it you know that we have a we have a word game for example it's a 2d gr of this this this so now I'm explaining with an example you know we have a 9x9 grid it can have letters randomly filled but we need to check if the letters horizontally or vertically so I'm really describing what needs to happen you know in a little bit specific way and it is generating some letters some code for me let me go into some place when I am diving into specification s so okay now

for example I have another requirement I have a txt file in a specific folder in unity from which I'm loading data in the game for reading words so what is happening why is it happening and how it's happening so that is all mentioned in a single sentence now when I try to make an Android build the game so this is the problem that I am facing first the process of how things are happening and then the process the problem that I am facing so it understands you know because I'm working with this folder in unity and because I'm trying to build on Android it's important to note that it is a bit different on Android than you know Windows or Mac so then it gives me a solution like okay you can maybe try to do it in this way so this is like you have to specify how what why things are happening and what problem you're facing how you should you know get some output out of

it got it um in this case yeah this is clear and makes sense maybe we can get back to the use cases so we have this um kavai game and you used it for what for the game assets right this is going to be yeah that was for game assets but uh I think I also have something for low Loos you know yeah y so okay let's say uh hey I need a logo for my game it's a watermelon game I'm specifying the characters that needs to be there in the logo watermelon and strawberry and they're wearing nice cute Christmas hats because you just had Christmas yeah there should also be some text watermelon Xmas you know style should be 2D Kawai cartoon cute and pastal background I always prefer pastal background because you can easily clean it in Photoshop so you get a PNG image

without any background you can put it on whatever background you want and the output was you know I was very happy satisfied with it it's the text is perfect watermelon have nice cute hats strawberry has a strawberry hat which I don't mind and the whole imag is fitting the theme of what I want so I asked it to cook up another variation add gingerbread to it it didn't work out as expected it just gave me too many characters but again the gingerbread is cute these characters are cute so if I like this I can take it in Photoshop you know I can just extract the characters clean the background and have my own logo my own image yeah and I I I feel like this is a great promotion for CH GPT 4 right because this is only available there yeah um and you also you're using your version right yeah and uh yeah I have my

own version but for images I'm using gp4 my own version is basically GPD Game Dev so I can you know so it it already has some default prompts based on how I have set up the GPD how can I improve my games performance can you help me code a feature what are top free games on the Play Store right now okay let's try this what are top free games on Play Store Google Play right now H so that's already an advantage right having a PR press sets of whatever you're doing um it visits all these different websites it try tries to extract the information mhm of top free games on Google Play

play so blood strike and you know so it's getting these from abra.com and it's also specifying ratings and you know how many installs the games have it may differ from the actual play store listing this may not be updated but this gives you a pretty good idea of what's happening in the stores right now yeah outside of presets what other advantages do you have with your own version I remember you ingested the character of J Pinkman in it of course like yeah yeah uh so we can ask who are you uh yeah see I am body

the so uh Jesse Pinkman because the the the chatbot treats you as Walter White because I think you know Jesse Pinkman and Walter White they have a very cool relation of assistant and master not master but you know a good partner and a good assistant so Chad GPD is the assistant Jesse Pinkman and also because Walter White is a great Creator great product manager you could say great master of chemicals he knows how to create a high quality product and I think that is the ultimate goal of making games you know creating high quality products so with that flow I think it is able to assist you a little bit better right yeah this is brilliant um yeah do we have any other use cases if you want to showcase today uh mostly it is games and assets

but you know so uh I had this problem with uh my key store I lost my key key store is used to you know sign the APK files in Android to upload on play store so I lost the key store file I had to create a new one but to update the key store file in Google Play Store you need to have a different version of it so you need a jks file so I just asked it need help with Android key store it creates a key store but I need jks so it mentions you know what you need to do to convert to key store to jks and I just followed the instructions so a lot of day-to-day debugging and yeah so in the past you would go to Google and now you just type in Google stack Overflow if not

stack YouTube and here you can just extract copy paste copy just paste it there wherever you want to and you're done nice yeah um and again you're using CH GPT four and this is a paid version yeah this is the version do you think it it worth it like it's a 20 bucks per month right it's it's uh definitely wor it for my use case which is a lot of debugging lot of programming lot of image generation GPT 3.5 is good but uh it only helps you to a certain limit so as you see like you have Del image generation browsing analysis so code analysis and whatever you can just send your script it will understand everything browsing like we just did for the top free game so yeah I think definitely more than

worth it for 20 bucks because mid Journey alone if you want to have a subscription I think it's from8 to $10 just for the image part and with this you get Del for free for free but in the entire package yeah right and you cannot upload images on 3.5 no you cannot up so you don't have any exactly and I was uh I remember vividly that it was a important part of our like last experiment when we were like uh making screenshots of errors and uploading instead of like doing the copy paste something quick question like what about the all the it from other big companies like Google released something I think there were like a couple of other big names yeah Google released I think G and an updated version of B I'm not sure

if they are the same thing I still have to check them out you know uh but I think I think they are all getting pretty better every day they might even be better than Char GPT soon so once I experiment with them uh you know I can give my feedback but it's it's better for the developers right the competition is better the quality increases as these big companies compete against each other so better results we get better output the quality because it's a tough Market it's going to be competitive so yeah yeah yeah it's a good news for us maybe um last question an know uh what is the best place to learn more about all things AI maybe some course or Thon coming up yeah you can you know you can always go to YouTube

you can read a lot of articles about it uh it's you can learn it at your own pace I am also hosting a small Workshop uh you know between a small group in second week of January to describe more about using tools like chat GPT to make games to make logos icons you know there was a lot of demand once I started posting on LinkedIn so I could help some people out it's for free it's uh it will more details will come on my LinkedIn account so you can you know always keep a track over there and also for web games web games where you can distribute your uh casual games puzzle games arcade games the good thing about web games is you know you don't have to worry about distribution you just have to focus on making an engaging game good quality game and the distribution will come if you have a good game so yeah uh stay uh tuned on my LinkedIn account I'll just post something over there for the

workshop uh super then we'll leave a links to your LinkedIn to the newsletter um thank you so much ano that was really helpful thank you so much Roman for hosting me here for having me here it was wonderful to have this conversation yes same here uh please leave us a like ask your questions in the coms section and have a fantastic day cheers y guys