Alex's Dino Game

Dinosaur!

Alex at Hesket has been a part of our first group of Launchpad Makers & Creators. Our Makers & Creators are focused on other areas of the Creative Arts beyond just Music — and include film makers, photographers, poets, costume designers, 3D builders — and in his case a Coder!

His first experiences with coding and making your own games came through Scratch, the fantastic and open-source coding platform that a lot of school kids have had a play with. As we explored Scratch we realized that to make the kinds of games that Alex was interested in the platform was both too complex (too many elements to string together for self development) and not capable enough to deliver on his vision.

Let’s Explore

We had a look at a number of different platforms to explore to develop his ideal game. There are lots of industry standard platforms like Unreal and Unity (which has fantastic education and learning content), but both were perhaps too big a bite to chew at this point.

Another option that we had a go with was Godot — another free and open-source platform for building 2D and 3D games that also has an active education and tutorial community. It was a good option but we found that GameMaker — although not completely free (but free for our purposes) was a little more user-friendly for a fresh developer. We had a go at one of the many tutorials on the GameMaker site to get familiar with their process of low-code game making, but ran into some roadblocks. The tutorial had an error that stumped us and slowed our progress

Enter the new champion

With all the hubub around coding with AI purely through prompts (knowing or using no or little code itself) we wondered how successful it would be to put our game making ideas to Claude AI and see what happens.

We decided that to ensure success we’d start with a simple concept of a side-scrolling game. Alex really loved the ‘Dinosaur Game’ that you can play when you lose your internet connection in Chrome (if you’re on Chrome browser try chrome://dino/). That was our jumping off point with a few unique tweaks. Here was our initial prompt:

Hey Claude! I want to build the dinosaur no internet connection game in javascript but the dinosaur should jump over eggs. It should be raining eggs for the dinosaur to avoid. If the eggs hit you you die. The dinosaur has 3 lives. There are stars to collect along the map that can give you an additional life. The dinosaur should move forward automatically once the level starts and the user will use the space bar to jump the eggs.

40 Iterations Later:

The cool thing about coding (or not coding) with AI through prompts is that it teaches the logic of writing your own program or game. Claude would code up what it thought we wanted for a given prompt and preview the game in the coding window for us to try. Alex would give it a go and note the things that didn’t work.

At first our Dinsoaur was a green box — so we had to make a Dinosaur sprite! Then the Dinosaur would jump but couldn’t clear the eggs. We had to figure out how to instruct Claude to account for either the width of the egg, or ultimately the width of the Dinosaur character when we’d jump.

Sometimes the changes would break the game, so we had to let it know what was wrong. The really cool feature we discovered was that we could take a screenshot of the bug we were seeing and share it as an attachment and Claude could analyse to ‘see’ what it was that we were seeing!. The technology was really amazing.

An awesome experiment

In the end we built what we set out to do — a really simple, proof of concept game that (unbeknownst to Alex) taught the fundamentals of putting together a program, game, product or any creative outcome — trial, error, analysis & review — rinse & repeat! Have a go at Alex’s simple Dinosaur game to see what you can do with AI coding too!

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