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PaperclipPerfector  1mo ago (text post)   1946 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.

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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.

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.

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