I made another AI built Idle clicker game? Yup.

icedteas — Thu, 22 May 2025 01:54:41 +0000

But this time it's not just in the text editor. There's a frontend.

The Recap

In my previous post I entered a submission on the AWS Challenge which was me testing out AI for the first time in a project setting. That release was a text editor idle game. So I thought, why not try to make something visual?

New Grounds

For this project I wanted to expand and try something everyone knows and talks about -- ChatGPT.

Previously whenever I would go on ChatGPT it would be to ask it to make me quick roadmaps to learn something. So instead of me taking weeks to master something based on its guidance, I wanted to see how smart ChatGPT really could be when it came to making a game. Well, I was surprised and impressed.

Oh no, another click your wrist off game

I didn't know what to expect when I first starting writing the prompt. I didn't think it would spit me out a working piece of code in Javascript that I could actually run within the program but it did. However, I don't know Javascript (yeah yeah, I know, it's powerful and everyone uses it, I should know it, oh well) but I do know basic HTML/CSS (shout out to The Odin Project and Freecodecamp). So I asked the AI to stick to the basic, bare bones of HTML/CSS as much as possible to see what it could create.

Results

Here's the start of the game where the player is introduced to the resources they're able to gather. I didn't choose the emojis, I said the skill names but ChatGPT has a huge love for emojis and chose them for me. I don't think anyone can see this emoji 🎯 and not think of ChatGPT these days.
In my prompt I asked the AI to generate the ability for 1 skill to be idled in at a time but I also wanted it to be the players choice. To make the game fun and not pointless I wanted the gathered resources to be spent somewhere and tracked. The task system is also incremental so as the player progresses in the game the task system requires higher amounts of resources to complete each task.
RNG in games might not be for everyone but it is a serotonin boost for many. In this game I asked the AI to implement a pet feature. This feature includes pets that the player can obtain at random while clicking, idle clicking and completing tasks. When the player has pets the click amount generated also increases. It's to be noted though that pets are included in the task requirements so they will be spent upon task completion.

Bugs - We're going to need a Costco case of Raid

I encountered a ton of bugs using ChatGPT to create this game vs when I used AWS to create the Idle Text RPG game. AWS in comparison provided smooth results, way less hiccups and didn't alter code that I didn't ask to be altered. Here are some of the biggest pain points I ran into making this AI only game with ChatGPT:

Unasked for content: As said above, the AI would constantly edit portions of my game when I would send a revision for something else. I don't know how intuitive the AI is in terms of learning from feedback but I made sure to tell the AI each time they edited logic that I never asked to be edited.
Visual edits: The frontend of the program changed drastically in each revision. I found myself having to send back the full HTML code to the AI and say "Use this as a reference, don't edit x logic, update only y logic" in order to get what I wanted. This is not something I had to do at all with AWS.
Code: Many times I had to remind ChatGPT that we were exporting this to be used in HTML/CSS.
Ignored requests: I wanted the game to format visually on mobile for the viewer to not be immediately turned off by the huge gaps and spacing between different parts of the program. I figured asking ChatGPT to compact the code a bit such as formatting the pets in a way that they were in 2 rows of 2 pets each vs 1 row of 3 pets and 1 row of 1 pet that this would be easy. Instantly proved wrong. This took a total of twelve revisions to complete. I probably could have fixed this myself but this was a AI only challenge.

The Point

I enjoyed this but I think ChatGPT learned more from me than I did from it. Overall though, I found this to be impressive but still a headache in some areas. That's programming in general though, right?

If you made it this far..

You can have the link to play the game.

Text RPG with idle capabilities built with Amazon Q Developer

icedteas — Wed, 07 May 2025 11:28:48 +0000

This is a submission for the Amazon Q Developer "Quack The Code" Challenge: Crushing the Command Line

What I Built

I built a text based RPG with abilities to idle up to 100 commands. This was done solely through the AI and not a single line of code written by myself. Impressive. The game includes three skills, rare pets to obtain along the way while skilling, an inventory to hold the players items, a bank to transfer items to and from the players inventory, the ability for the player to equip and unequip items as well as a collection log to track the players item progressions.

Demo

Here is what the interface looks like with a list of the areas that the player can navigate to once they set their name in-game.

I also implemented idle abilities that allow the player to select how many actions they would like to complete. The max is 100 actions in a single command, which are staged based on the players skill level and tier of gear worn. The time to gather materials or make items becomes faster as the player levels up their gear or if the player buys boosts from the shop.

There is a shop where the player can buy power ups to assist in skilling, crafting and alching items as well as purchase skill mastery capes.

Code Repository

Feel free to check out the game here on my GitHub in the codespace. Good luck collecting the pets, they're rare!

How I Used Amazon Q Developer

I will admit, I am usually pretty hesitant about using AI - but this experience might have completely changed my mind. In the past I have attempted to do this same genre on other AI platforms but was instantly discouraged by the results. My previous attempts provided me with buggy code, a visually unorganized interface and my original prompt was ignored, but with Amazon Q Developer this was not the case, at all.

I might have went a little above and beyond on my initial prompt seeing as it was 868 words but everything I asked for was provided. The AI created the workspace in Visual Studio Code as well as created the files and programmed every line of code.

On my first couple of play throughs I found some areas that I had missed in my original prompt to have implemented. Upon finding these areas I asked the AI to add some additional features, which worked out great.

Some of the additional prompts I asked to have updated was:

Add a stackable feature to all items within the inventory, not just materials.
Implement an idle system. In my original prompt the player would have put in commands individually to obtain, make or alch items. This would have been a very tedious process for the player. By adding a max of 100 items to complete in an idle format resolved this pain point.
Fixed uppercase names for commands on crafting and alching items. The original expected commands needed the beginning letter of the item to be uppercase in order for the code to execute properly. I had the AI fix this so it wouldn't be confusing for the player to have to do "bronze" vs "Bronze" in different areas of the game.

Going Forward

I really appreciated what I gained from this experience. This is a great tool for people who have ideas and want to create something without having to devote extensive amounts of time into mastering the behind the scenes aspects. The feature of the AI being built into Visual Studio Code was also painless to navigate and provided many benefits to this project. Ultimately, shout out to all the developers who had a hand in creating this tool.

Inspiration Credit

Perhaps some of you could already tell, but this game is a minimized version of a few skilling aspects of the popular MMORPG Old School RuneScape (OSRS). I've been an avid scaper for over 20 years (you never truly quit) which prompted me to want to challenge myself by taking a few key aspects of the game and combine multiple skills into one skill to build a compact demo.
Credit: Old School RuneScape website | Old School RuneScape Wikipedia

DEV Community: icedteas