This is a submission for the GitHub Copilot CLI Challenge
Hello, dev community!!! 🖐
I created a game in Godot using GitHub copilot. But was everything as great as I thought?
Why didn't I choose my dream project - SDF Editor?
I wanted to create something new, and I wanted Copilot to do everything for me. But something didn't work out, and it turned out the other way around.
What I Built
Hollow Pilot is a game inspired by Hollow Knight. It includes:
- Movement mechanics – jumping, dashing, walking
- Combat system – attacking, healing, dying, defeating bosses
I'd like to believe it's cool, but there's one big problem...
What was wrong?
Well, it's easier to say what was good. Okay.
The biggest problem is that copilot doesn't know how to make games:
- He can't write scenes.
- He might have made mistakes in the language syntax.
- He can't connect the scene and the script, so I did everything.
The most minor thing was that everything looked as bad as possible. There were no animations (I didn't bother making them, I'm too lazy). The movement logic looks terrible, especially for the boss.
The positive side
Things were bad, so I made them worse! Just look at this:
And video link: Demo.mp4
You ask, what's going on, dude?!
Well... It's a reflection of the technical crisis.
Why is Reddit here? - It was a weird decision - I was just reading a post on reddit and I didn't like the comment there, so... lol, what's that related?
What is this place? - I didn't have the energy to make a location from Hollow Knight, and I didn't have the energy to look for assets for his style, so this is what I came across
My Experience with GitHub Copilot CLI
This is where the fun begins. I successfully installed it, launched it and started creating.
But then something went wrong:
I asked for the code to be printed, but I forgot to specify the directory, lol. All the files were in the user folder.
Okay, I moved the files. I opened them in Godot. But the scenes wouldn't open. The file syntax was completely different, so I had to create the scenes myself.
There were syntax errors in the code too, of course.
But the most interesting thing is that copilot simply hates @onready – a special variable type used to declare nodes or resources after the ready function has been called (i.e., when the scene is loaded, nodes can't exist unless the scene also doesn't exist). The problem was that it was writing the entire path to the node, which is why there were many related errors.
Conclusion
Copilot is certainly a powerful tool, but it's completely unsuitable for game development. I also didn't notice any differences from the web version of Copilot, other than the lack of an interface. It does everything equally well, or poorly.
What do we have in the end?
Well, a game that works "through a stump-deck"
And also 3 days wasted
I hope this isn't my last game, and in the future, when "better times come," I'll make something better. Or I'll write another article where I write about how bad everything is.
Of course, I wanted to do something more, at least write this article in more detail and more beautifully, but "AI just sucked all the juices out of me." See you all.
Top comments (7)
Lol! Solid effort nonetheless! Painfully very true that AI can absolutely excel autonomously on common langugages but crashes and burns for stuff like game dev. I've not had much luck using it for Love2D (based on lua). I find in these cases coding 'the old fashioned way' is both quicker and more enjoyable than trying to force it to produce a subpar output. Always good to see the other side of the wonder stories to provide a good reality check!
Thanks!
Maybe the Google (Gemini) AI coding products would have been a better fit for this kind of project (games)?
Yes, Gemini is definitely better at handling all these tasks than GPT chat. I tried it through an unofficial website. I'd happily use it if I had Gmail.
Yeah but I also mean their new coding IDE (even a newer variant with "agents" built in) - haven't tried it, though ...
For me, it's still easier to use VS Code and the web interface. I even remember a discussion about the difference between an AI agent in a code editor and an AI agent in a browser.
It's a recent "promotion" by dev.to that drew my attention to it: "Google AI Studio" (basic IDE) and "Google Antigravity" (their "agentic" tool) - but I haven't tried any of them!
P.S. saw good reviews on "Google AI Studio", but terrible reviews on "Google Antigravity" (come back in 1 or 2 years and "Google Antigravity" might be usable)