Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

319 points

a year ago

I'm a software developer with 20+ years of experience but during this time I never programmed any games, but I really wanted to for the longest time. With the advent of AI coding agents I thought that this is the best time to try and so I've learned a bit of Phaser.js (a Javascript based game engine) and entered Beginner's Jam Summer 2025 - a game jam for beginners in the game dev industry that allows AI coding. After around 25-30 hours (working mainly after my full-time day job) I managed to submit the game I called "Tower of Time" (the theme of the jam was "Time Travel").

You can play it in your browser here: https://m4v3k.itch.io/tower-of-time

The goal of this project for me was first and foremost to see if AI coding is good enough to help me with creating something that's actually fun to play and to my delight is turns out the answer is yes! I decided to document the whole process for myself and others to learn from my mistakes, so both the code AND all the prompts I used are published on GitHub (see submission link). The art assets are largely taken from itch.io artists who shared them for free, with some slight touch ups. Sounds came from freesound.org.

I've also streamed parts of the process, you can watch me working on the final stretch and submitting the finished game (warning, it's 5+ hours long):

https://www.twitch.tv/videos/2503428478

During this process I've learned a lot and I want to use this knowledge in my next project that will hopefully be more ambitious. If you have any comments or questions I'm here to answer!

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