I’ve just started my journey into game development. I see many people online using AI to create entire games; personally, that approach doesn't really suit me, yet I’m still wondering how to effectively leverage AI as an indie developer. I used AI to help write code for my first game, but to be honest, I didn't find it satisfying—it felt more like I was learning how to use Unity rather than gaining a deep understanding of game programming. So, I decided to code my current project from scratch. Some friends have criticized me for "reinventing the wheel" simply because I want to learn game programming properly, starting from the fundamentals. I’d love to hear your thoughts on this. (A bit of background: I’m a Computer Science student nearing graduation; I want to pursue a career in the game industry while also developing my own games.)

I make games with c++ or godot and for c++ i will use ai for stuff that i don’t understand or repetivie tasks, but i do not use ai to create any assets or marketing.

I mostly use ChatGPT as a replacement for google searches or forums like stack overflow. Sometimes I let it generate a isolated function here and there, but I don't trust it to do anything more complicated. 

AI can be a powerful tool, but it can also get into weird tangents. One time at work, I fed it an mail related error and it wanted to completly rewrite the entire mail function. The real problem? SMTP server didn't exist anymore, just a configuration problem.  Nothing wrong with the code. 

Another time in my own game project, it wanted to rewrite half of the GUM UI library just because I wanted to change the background of my buttons. I canceled that, checked the documentation, and lo and behold, its like 3 lines of code to change the background texture of a button.  

I personally use a little bit of AI in my games, but only to a degree that isn't risky...
except for one, which has a lot of AI, and that's why I have no intention of monetizing it...
it will always be free.

I don't recommend using AI to code or make anything for the final game. If you really want to use AI, the way to do it is to ask the AI to explain something you didn't knew or couldn't figure out. Then you can read it and write the code yourself in your own way. Don't just copy and paste. The AI will probably give you a really complicated solution but if you can understand the logic, you can write the code again using what you know in coding. This means that you have a lot of control over your game and if you are adding new mechanics or dealing with bugs you will have an easier time than using AI generated code, and you will be able to learn, improve your skills and also feel satisfied for it. 

This is just a recommendation. You can do anything that is comfortable with you!

everyone has there own ways

I've got a image loader, tilemap extracter, rect colision, pushing hitbox, objects with velocity, control detection, particles, and start menu which I all made from scratch. I keep reusing them in my games.

Hi! Well let me start sharing my thoughts about this by saying that I'm a Software Engineer who wants to develop game as well so I kinda get your situation. First of all I've to give you heads up about using AI in Game Development because that opens a possibility of negative feedback (from mild to harsh language that can be used in these comments😅). But I think that you shouldn't let that stop you, more of makes you prepared for it and to set your expectations right. 

Now to move on to your question: 

"Right way to use AI?"

Since my friend and I are still new to game development—we only developed 1 game—I'll tell you what we've figured out so far:

1. Your idea, your plan: If you want to find a good result after using AI to develop your game you must be clear as water about all the details you want in your game. Get ready for lots of docs, diagrams, and sketches. 
2. Assets hunt: It's better for you to look for assets packs before you decide that you didn't find what you're looking for and make AI do it. This is better both for social standards and your skills. 
3. Repeated tasks: In our current game, I saw that I must fill the details of some assets objects in unity for 10 elements that I already had written down in my notes. For a similar case where it's all about copy, paste etc... I believe that's where AI agents work best.
4. Tutorial for making your game: this is how we currently use it for Unity. By the way I find Unity's tutorial really awesome but to save the time to learn things on another template or game you can let it customize a tutorial to build your own game. 

You might think that: "But I'll still do things manually" and yes. It might be because of poor internet connection, slow internet speed, or following a no-cost/low-cost strategy while using AI, but I found that AI-agents—on the free-tier at least— requires you to do things on your own. Which is not something bad you know 🤭.

By the way this all depends on the game engine you use, if you use one and what kind of game you're doing. You'll need to accommodate yourself based on the different conditions your game provides. And of course there's no ultimate instructions about the right way to use AI, I was just trying to share what we learned so far. 🙈

Honestly? Do what feels right for you. I feel like I learn a lot about coding from asking ChatGPT to write scripts from me, and then learning from the scripts as I go through them, and I'll probably be able to write my own scripts eventually, which will probably be way better for my project in the long run. But different people have different preferences.

Then you also have lots of strong opinions about AI, from people who insist anything AI-related is the devil to people who seemingly want to use it for everything.

The engagement bait thread I was hoping for in late 2026... AI + games + indies: what do??

We don't write games in assembly or binary, so we shouldn't be worried about writing games in English instead of C.

is one take.

Automagic autocomplete, whether large language model in origin or asset store packaged labor trends toward low effort releases, leaving a bad taste in everyone's mouths especially the players who aren't following along *too* closely what's happening behind the scenes.

Here's what I really really really like about AI game dev right now in October '26

Homebrew is *amazing.* We already had a lot of homebrew SDKs coming out across a lot of old consoles, but AI is absolutely great at actually using all that software without you having to learn Sega Genesis fan SDKs on your own. Truly amazing stuff.

Roll your own engine & 3D web games -- again, absolutely amazing. Game dev had been getting stale because everyone uses Unity, Unreal, (and now Godot) -- but games made with engine defaults tend to feel "samey" and while you can argue AI Threes.js games feel samey as a category, they feel quite unique compared to Unity or Godot games on the web and they are TINY. I'm making 500kb 3d games with AI, it's just drawing all the models in math like a psycho.

-----------------------------------------------------------

TL;DR: SHOULD YOU LEARN TO CODE / READ THE CODE / SIT UNDER THE BINARY WATERFALL AWAITING ENLIGHTEMENT:
It has absolute incredible value to know what computers are, what they can do, what they can't do, what exists, how things work etc etc.
But if your goal is to make games -- just make games, by any means necessary.

Oh and also the meta is having AI make tools for you. This is a screenshot of a tile / palette editor for a famicom ROM I'm working on. I can play my ROM right there in the tool and export it as a complete .NES file to be loaded into emulators right from this tool. I have tools like this for everything I'm working on right now. I would *never* make stuff this good for myself, surely not in 15 minutes.