site banner
PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1933 thread views

Small-Scale Question Sunday for March 1, 2026

Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?

This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.

Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.

2
Top Bottom Old Controversial Comments
Jump in the discussion.

No email address required.

As someone with almost no experience I want to use AI code a game that’s basically a top down build and chase tag type game, think rts custom mod.

How feasible is this? What should I use? AI says Godot but I have no idea if that’s a good suggestion.

Godot actually is a good suggestion. It's an engine that's very amneable to a code-centric approach, which should make it much easier for an LLM to work on.

If you want to make an RTS custom map, why not use an RTS with custom map features instead? You will have a lot of assets available to you, and for the most popular games there should be a decent amount of documentation for the AI to draw on.

I want to make a standalone game. There’s already a custom map that I’m playing now.

I see. In that case, Godot, Unreal Engine, and Unity are all fine choices. Unreal Engine is probably out if you want the AI to generate most of the code though, since it will likely have to write it in C++, and I doubt you want to deal with that as a beginner. Between Unity and Godot, it is down to personal preference. There may be more tutorials on Unity, which would make your AI better at giving good responses. But the GDScript language of Godot is in my opinion more beginner friendly than C#.

As for feasibility, making a game is hard and takes time. Without AI, I would estimate anything remotely complex as a multi-year project, provided you want to make a game and not just a tech demo. Even making solid custom maps (where much of the code and assets you need already exist) can take months. With AI however, maybe that will change.

Unreal Engine is probably out if you want the AI to generate most of the code though, since it will likely have to write it in C++, and I doubt you want to deal with that as a beginner.

Unreal Engine is out for a beginner for a whole host of reasons, but one thing that GPT 5.2 is actually decent at is writing C++ code. I have a decade of experience in C# in Unity and a good deal with Godot, and hadn't done any C++ in over five years, then came to Unreal...and ChatGPT and the GPT-5.2 Copilot really pulled their weight in getting me onboarded. Turns out their corpus of training data does contain a lot of C++ knowledge!

That said, Unreal really is monstrous for beginner devs, and Unity and Godot are clearly the sane choices.

It's got a developer with more programming background than (I think) ThomasdelVasto has, but I'll point to Three Kingdoms Strategem. It's very much emphasizing the retro bit for speed of development, but I could believe Petersen's <six month estimate more than I do the GTA6 release date.

My estimate assumes ThomasdelVasto is a beginner at all things gamedev and is working alone in his spare time. Not saying all interesting games take that long. Obviously it changes with experience and how much time you allocate.

That said, AI could speed up the process, and it depends on how ambitious he is. It is of course entirely possible to spend less time if you know what you are doing, and keep a reasonable scope. But anyone opening with "what engine should I use" probably doesn't know all that much yet.

I did not mean to be discouraging, but simply wanted to inform that making games is difficult and takes time. An interesting prototype can be created within a few weeks, but making something that is fun for an hour or more just takes a lot of effort.

But a lot depends on the AI. If it can make up for the lack of experience, then maybe this project will take much less time than that.

Zorba’s rant general advice on engines holds pretty strong today: Godot’s closer to Unity in ease of use and Unity’s licenses are worse and worse-supported now than then, but the ranking matches my feelings. That said, as bad as getting a wildly mismatched engine can be (eg, it is technically possible to do an action game in newer RPGmakers; it just sucks), for simple projects the perfect is the enemy of the good enough.

Make sure the engine can deploy to the target environment you want, check if any game BBC in the engine rhymes with your concept, and that the license isn’t ruinous, and pull the trigger.

Feasibility… depends on scale, and how much no experience is.

Claude and Codex can do a lot for someone who doesn’t know what a class is, but if you every want to look under the hood you’ll need at least a 101-level understanding of primitives vs classes, object instantiating, method calls, flow control, and dealing with coordinate systems from hell. For simple projects you can avoid that sorta inspection, but it’ll cost you a ton of time and tokens.

Scales’ the other half of things. Even if you can get consistent character art out of a diffusion model ten times faster than a conventional artist, trying to make a 100-plus character roster might still cost weeks and months in a 3d environment or with dozens of complex sprite animations. On the other hand, if you’re aiming for 2010-mobile game level complexity, it might not even be a week to a prototype.

Should be doable. Use claude code or codex.

Use one that allows you to host the game in local with fast compile times. AI improves via feedback loops. It is much easier to guide it when it can do a quick compile -> view -> fix -> repeat. Given the popularity of Unity, LLMs would be most comfortable developing with it. Don't take on a large change by itself. AIs are best at getting some demo in, and then iterating on it.

I hate C# (and all Java family languages), but Unity sounds like the easiest way to get started.

I'm not in the industry but make things for fun sometimes, and my experience with godot is that it can be a bit hard to get one's head around. On the other hand I do everything manually and haven't vibecoded so who knows?

But it seems hard to go wrong with python.

Hmmm another dev interested in this is saying Unity. Seems tough to learn.

IMO Unity is the best-rounded and most user-friendly toolkit. In terms of functionality, its Editor is leagues ahead of Godot's and Unreal's. C# scripting is the best balance of powerful and easy to learn. OTOH, Unity has legendarily unreliable licensing, it's full of crusty, outdated systems that dangle around and can lead you on pointless detours, and a bunch of deeply-entrenched bugs with a prognosis of "won't be fixed, just hope the system gets replaced". Unity does have by far the most resources available for learning, and by extension probably the biggest knowledge-base for LLMs to work with. Its runtime performance is easily the worst out of the big three.

Godot is lighter-weight, more streamlined, has better performance, and is easier to work with if you want to do as much as possible in code. But depending on what functionality you want, especially from the editor, it may simply lack some of the features that Unity offers. Its documentation is also hit and miss, and it contains some bugs on account of its relative immaturity, which however do get fixed with some regularity.

What is this place?

This website is a place for people who want to move past shady thinking and test their ideas in a court of people who don't all share the same biases. Our goal is to optimize for light, not heat; this is a group effort, and all commentators are asked to do their part.

The weekly Culture War threads host the most controversial topics and are the most visible aspect of The Motte. However, many other topics are appropriate here. We encourage people to post anything related to science, politics, or philosophy; if in doubt, post!

Check out The Vault for an archive of old quality posts. You are encouraged to crosspost these elsewhere.


Why are you called The Motte?

A motte is a stone keep on a raised earthwork common in early medieval fortifications. More pertinently, it's an element in a rhetorical move called a "Motte-and-Bailey", originally identified by philosopher Nicholas Shackel. It describes the tendency in discourse for people to move from a controversial but high value claim to a defensible but less exciting one upon any resistance to the former. He likens this to the medieval fortification, where a desirable land (the bailey) is abandoned when in danger for the more easily defended motte. In Shackel's words, "The Motte represents the defensible but undesired propositions to which one retreats when hard pressed."

On The Motte, always attempt to remain inside your defensible territory, even if you are not being pressed.


New post guidelines

If you're posting something that isn't related to the culture war, we encourage you to post a thread for it. A submission statement is highly appreciated, but isn't necessary for text posts or links to largely-text posts such as blogs or news articles; if we're unsure of the value of your post, we might remove it until you add a submission statement. A submission statement is required for non-text sources (videos, podcasts, images).

Culture war posts go in the culture war thread; all links must either include a submission statement or significant commentary. Bare links without those will be removed.

If in doubt, please post it!


Rules


Recommended Posts And Communities

Recommended Realtime Chats