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When people talk about using AI to make a video game, they sometimes imagine typing one sentence and receiving a finished game. A more useful approach is to treat AI as a partner inside a small development loop: decide what to build, make one change, run the game, and check what happened.
Start with a simple idea and a clear goal. For example, the player moves around a small screen and avoids falling objects. Godot’s official beginner tutorial recommends starting with 2D if you are new to the engine. Its example game teaches practical building blocks: setting up a project, moving a character, creating enemies, and keeping score. These parts are small enough to understand, but they combine into a complete playable experience.
An AI coding assistant can help at several points. It can inspect a project and explain how its scenes and scripts fit together. You can ask it to add one feature, such as making an enemy appear every few seconds. Codex CLI can read and edit project files and run commands from the terminal, so it can work in the same project folder as your game. A useful request gives the assistant context, names one outcome, and asks it to explain the change.
The first result may still be wrong. The assistant might use an old engine function, misunderstand a node name, or change a script without noticing how the game feels. That is why the loop matters. Run the game after each change. If something breaks, share the exact error or describe what you see. Ask for a small repair, then test again. This is usually easier to manage than asking for a whole game at once.
AI can also help brainstorm levels, write temporary dialogue, explain an error message, or suggest ways to test a game. But game development includes more than code. A person still needs to decide whether the controls feel good, whether the challenge is fair, and whether players understand what to do. Generated art, music, or text should also be checked for quality and for permission to use.
There is one more useful distinction: AI can help developers make a game, and AI can also appear inside the game as a character or opponent. Those are different uses. For a first project, it is often easier to use AI as a coding and learning partner while keeping the game itself simple. The goal is not to avoid every mistake. The goal is to make a small game, understand it, and improve it one tested step at a time.