Show HN: PlayCodeAI – A tool I created to let my kid create their own videogames

7 points by AlexITC a day ago

Hi hn,

Its been a while since my kid has been dreaming to make videogames, as you know, the entry bar is high, too many technical details are involved.

A few months ago, we started making games, we have tried many different ways, from dragging blocks to write code with a high-level library to make it simple, it is still too much work.

Getting into the AI boat, I decided to give it a try for making games, turns out that it works super nicely, still, you still have many technical concepts involved, what language should the game be written in? where do you store the file/assets? how do you run it?

I decided creating a simple playground where most of the tech details are already defined, html/javascript due to the portability they provide, we can get the code and see the result right away, same way, we can easily export it and upload it to a server.

So far, the results are amazing, my kid has managed to create 10 simple games in a few hours with no help at all (the landing page includes screenshots from these).

I strongly believe that this can help many other people to bring their ideas to life.

As of now, the tool is simple, it runs on the client side, requiring an OpenAI API Key to interact with the models, it has the problem that only paid users can access this and I hope to remove that barrier soon but this was the simplest/fastest way to get things done.

A big limitation relates to image loading, many images have CORS limitations that chatgpt can't detect, games without images aren't fun and I hope to solve this soon (suggestions accepted).

I'd also love making it simple to share the results with others.

Anyway, if your kid is willing to make a videogame, I encourage you to try this out, any feedback should help me to polish this to be usable for others.

Thanks.