Echoes of the Forgotten: My First Game as a Beginner Using Amazon Q and Pygame.

avinashshetty123 — Tue, 03 Jun 2025 16:06:23 +0000

Introduction

I’m not an indie developer or a professional game designer. I’m just a beginner — someone who had a weird but exciting game idea and wanted to try building it from scratch.

With no real background in game development, I turned to Amazon Q, an AI coding assistant, and Pygame, a simple Python library for games. The result? A spooky, mysterious game idea called:

"Echoes of the Forgotten: The Loop"

In this post, I’ll share:

The game concept I came up with
The prompt I gave Amazon Q
How I used AI to build my first game mechanics
What I learned along the way

The Game Idea: "Echoes of the Forgotten"

The idea hit me:

What if you play as a blind character, trapped in a strange place, with no way to see the world — except by making noise?

In the game, you play as Elara, a blind girl stuck in an endless, haunted orphanage. You can’t see anything — the screen is black — until you press the spacebar, which creates a sound pulse that lights up the world for just a moment.

But there's a catch:

Making noise also attracts The Warden, a scary creature that hunts sound.

Your goal is to explore, survive, and find hidden memory fragments that reveal Elara’s past and the dark truth of the orphanage.

The Prompt I Used with Amazon Q

Since I was new to coding games, I asked Amazon Q to help by giving it this detailed prompt:

Prompt I Gave Amazon Q:

I want to create a 2D endless psychological horror puzzle game using Pygame, titled "Echoes of the Forgotten: The Loop". The player is blind and must navigate a procedurally generated environment using sound pulses (activated with the spacebar) that simulate echolocation — briefly revealing nearby walls and objects in a radial ripple. The player must collect memory fragments scattered throughout an infinite, ever-shifting orphanage while avoiding a sound-sensitive enemy called The Warden who hunts based on noise.

Features I asked Amazon Q to generate:

Endless rooms or exploration

Sound-based navigation system

Basic memory collection

Enemy that hears and chases sound

Simple placeholders (like circles and rectangles).

What Amazon Q Helped Me Build

Amazon Q helped me generate:

A working game loop in Pygame
A player character that sends out ripples of sound
A chasing enemy that listens for those ripples
A way to create rooms and hide memory fragments

It even split the code into helpful files like main.py, player.py, and enemy.py — making it easier for me to read and understand.

What Makes the Game Different

Even as a beginner, I wanted my game to be more than just "fun" — I wanted it to feel mysterious and emotional.

Key mechanics and features:

You can’t see — only "hear" your way through
Rooms are endless, so it feels like a never-ending maze
Memories tell a story bit by bit
The enemy learns over time, and things start to feel strange or wrong

What I Learned

This project taught me:

That you don’t need to be an expert to start game dev
How to use Pygame for simple 2D graphics
How to ask better questions to AI tools like Amazon Q
How powerful even basic mechanics can feel when combined with a strong idea

Most of all, it showed me how fun it is to build something unique from scratch — even if it's small, even if it's not perfect.

What’s Next

Now that the core mechanics are working, I’m planning to:

Add more types of rooms and puzzles
Make the enemy smarter and scarier
Introduce a “madness” effect that changes gameplay over time
Let players collect all 10 memories and maybe… escape the loop?

Watch the Game in Action

Github Repository

avinashshetty123 / echoes_of_forgotten

Echoes of the Forgotten

A 2D psychological horror puzzle game built with Pygame, centered around sound-based navigation (echolocation) and a layered mystery-horror narrative.

Game Concept

You play as Elara, a blind girl who wakes up in a decrepit orphanage with no memory of how she got there. Using sound to navigate the pitch-black world, you must solve puzzles, avoid "The Warden," and collect memory fragments to uncover the truth about your past.

Core Mechanics

Echolocation Navigation

The screen is mostly black
Emit sound (spacebar) to reveal the environment momentarily through radial ripples
Different surfaces return different echo patterns (metal, wood, flesh, stone)

Sound-Based Puzzles

Reproduce rhythms
Identify sound directions
Solve voice-based riddles
Interpret reversed audio clues

The Warden (AI Enemy)

Invisible ghost-like enemy that reacts to sound
Must strategically distract it by making noise elsewhere
Different states: patrolling, investigating, hunting

Memory Fragments

Scattered throughout the orphanage
Reveal partial flashbacks in…

View on GitHub

Final Thoughts

If you’re a beginner like me, and you’ve got a weird game idea stuck in your head — go for it.

Use tools like Amazon Q, and Pygame to experiment and learn. You’ll be surprised by what you can build, even with zero experience.

"Echoes of the Forgotten: The Loop" started as just a thought…

Now it’s becoming a real game — and that’s honestly kind of awesome.

Thanks for reading!
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