Zero code game, how did it go, an honest review
I got the challenge to my inbox, "Build Classics with Amazon Q Developer CLI". At first, I thought this was some form of tutorial that would teach me how to make games, but I would eventually have to code myself. But it is much more than that!!
I have great memories from my childhood playing games like Chuckie Egg and Beach head on the ZX Spectrum. Even back then, I wanted to do games development of some sort. Roll on 40 years and here I'm back again, I want to see if AI can help me make a game
Ideas for the game? Well that put me on the spot, but another game favourite is the arcade game 1943, so with that I decided what if you could be on one of those ships that were under attack, maybe then those Aircraft might not be so successful!!
To begin, you have the choice of development language to use. I have some experience with python, so I went with that, but in fairness I could just as easily have picked any of them, as it is possible to create the game from start to finish without writing a single line of code.
That's exactly what I did.
Using prompts, I described the scene, a blue gradient sky scrolling mountains on the horizon. I experimented with parallax scrolling like the effects from the 16-bit computers like the Amiga back in the day. It created it perfectly, but I dismissed it back to the original flat scrolling as it was not the effect I wanted.
With further prompts I was able to add the turret, lower the horizon and introduce enemy aircraft. Amazon-Q went ahead and added sound effects and a score system without me having to ask. It immediately knew what was needed.
At a point I decided to add in side scrolling and got Amazon-Q to implement a wrap around scroll with a working compass. To begin the wrap around did not seem to return to the start, so I introduced a yellow building on the mountains and with that it was better able to get the scroll around to return to the start. That was not how I expected it to think and debug, it was a human like thing to do!!
Overall impression of Amazon-Q
It is amazing, not at all what I expected. I left the game as is, with no outside artifacts like sprite images or sound waveforms. Everything was produced from the prompts. Yes, I will spend time and develop better sprites and more authentic sounds. I just wanted you to see what can be done from prompts only over the course of an afternoon.
The code produce is well documented making it easy for me to understand what is happening, making it possible to add to it in the future.
Positives
- Easy to use
- Creates all the framework and code
- Interacts with your system seamlessly
- Fast to get a project up and running
Negatives
- It struggled to get the flight paths correct, even after numerous attempts. I think the larger the project, the more difficult it can become for it.
- It can spend quite a while "Thinking" at times
Over all, it's a 9/10 for me.
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