🎮 Building Competitive Arcade Games with Amazon Q CLI and PyGame – #AmazonQCLI Challenge

Hey everyone! 👋

I recently participated in the #AmazonQCLI Game Development Challenge, where I explored building full-featured games using nothing but chat-based prompts with Amazon's new AI coding tool — Amazon Q CLI.

In this blog, I’ll walk you through how I created a mini arcade hub with three competitive games using Amazon Q CLI + PyGame, how AI helped me solve classic programming problems, and how you can try it yourself.

🛠️ Tools Used

💬 Amazon Q CLI (Generative AI for local dev)
🐍 Python + PyGame
💻 Windows 11
📁 My GitHub Repo

🎮 The Games I Built

I created three fast-paced mini-games that you can choose and launch from a single arcade hub:

1. 🚀 Stack Dash
   A simple game, where the player have to collect the stacks.

2. 👻 Ghost Chase
   A suspenseful maze runner where you’re constantly pursued by a ghost that adapts to your path.

3. 🧱 Bullet Bounce
   A physics-based ricochet game where bullets bounce off walls, and your job is to survive their chaos.

All of these games are designed to be simple, addictive, and competitive — perfect for showcasing what AI-assisted game development can do.

Prompting Amazon Q CLI

📌 Prompt Example – Game Setup

Create a PyGame game where a player-controlled spaceship dodges falling asteroids. Add increasing speed, score tracking, and a game-over screen.

🔧 Q CLI automatically:

• Generated the PyGame window & loop
• Added dynamic obstacles
• Created scoring and game-over UI
• Set difficulty progression

📌 Prompt Example – Bullet Bounce Physics

Make bullets bounce off walls and keep moving at the same angle. Track collisions with player and reduce health.

This generated logic using vector reflection:

if bullet.rect.left <= 0 or bullet.rect.right >= WIDTH:
    bullet.dx *= -1
if bullet.rect.top <= 0 or bullet.rect.bottom >= HEIGHT:
    bullet.dy *= -1

✅ AI handled tricky math and physics beautifully!

⏱️ Development Time Saved

Tasks that usually take hours took minutes:

Sprites and animations
Scoring system and UI
Event handling for power-ups and enemies
Game restart logic

🧠 Prompting Tip: Ask Amazon Q to “refactor this into separate files” or “add comments for clarity” — it works great!

📸 Screenshots

Menu:

Bullet Bounce:

Stack Dash:

Ghost Chase:

📂 GitHub Repo

🕹️ Play or explore the code here:
🔗 https://github.com/Rocky2004-tech/arcade-games

Feel free to fork it or suggest new arcade games for the hub!

🚀 Why You Should Try Amazon Q CLI

This experience completely changed how I view game development. Instead of starting with blank files, I could express my vision in natural language and refine it rapidly with code suggestions.

You can do this too:

1. Create an AWS Builder ID
2. Install Amazon Q CLI
3. Build with prompts
4. Share your creation using #AmazonQCLI

🙌 Final Thoughts

This project was a blast to build — not only did I finish multiple games faster than ever, but I also discovered a new way of thinking about development through collaboration with AI.

Thanks to Amazon Q CLI, my creative ideas turned into playable prototypes within hours, not days.

Give it a shot — build, learn, and have fun!
Let me know what you think, and feel free to share your own projects in the comments.

✍️ Blog Post by @Rocky2004-tech
🎮 #AmazonQCLI #PyGame #GameDev #AI #Python #ArcadeGames