Lesson 3: Brainstorming with an AI and Setting Up Controls
Game programming has never been so smooth and approachable. Clear your mind of whatever difficulties you expect to face and do not worry at all if you’ve never written a line of code before. AI affords us a new maxim: if you can type, you can code.
You’re the human. You supply the ideas, the taste, the discernment. Your AI assistant can help you generate code and squash bugs but at the end of the day you are still in charge. What’s special about Jippity’s AI is its kid-friendliness: it keeps its output simple and always explains what it’s doing, and it can also handle the vague messages of brand-new programmer. The basic flow is to go back and forth with Jippity, asking for new features and edits, constantly testing, and editing code by hand as your confidence and familiarity rises. We can start from zero!
My starting prompt:
“Let’s make a game where I control a bird and try to glide as far as possible.”
Jippity sets up the project and when I click “Let’s get started!” the AI asks me some follow up questions:
They are good questions! Brainstorming and scoping out a project is an essential part of programming that must occur before you even think about writing a line of code. I type back a long response. This is OK — the more detail, the better. The description of your idea doesn’t need to be technical or complete. Of course the project will morph as it goes. But writing down some words gets your brain cooking and gives the AI some context with which it can work its magic.
Indeed, now that Jippity “gets” what I’m going for, it can suggest some starter code. It generates a block on the left side. I click Insert This Code! to pop the suggestion into my project on the right side.
Click the orange Run button to test it out and voila! — a little yellow “bird” flies across the screen, tilting back and forth with the A and D keys.
There is much more to add, obviously, but now we have something. Painless so far! From idea to functional code, lubricated by AI. Let’s push on and work with Jippity to turn this into a real game that looks good and feels good to play. We’ll pick up a lot of coding knowledge through immersion along the way, and on top of that, Jippity does a good job of spelling out its strategy and the details of its implementation. We’ll even get our hands dirty editing some code ourselves.
