Show HN: I AI coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process
Hacker News - AI
Jul 4, 2025 12:34
M4v3R
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Summary
A veteran software developer with no prior game development experience used AI coding agents and Phaser.js to create and submit a browser-based tower defense game, "Tower of Time," for a beginner-friendly game jam. The developer documented the entire process, including code and AI prompts, demonstrating that AI tools can effectively assist non-experts in producing playable, enjoyable games. This project highlights AI's growing potential to lower barriers to entry in game development and creative coding.
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 publi