How to Make a Video Game With ChatGPT in 60 Minutes

TL;DR: Today we’re releasing a new episode of our podcast How Do You Use ChatGPT? I go in depth with Logan Kilpatrick, OpenAI’s first developer relations and advocacy hire. As we talk, we build our own text-based strategy game together in 60 minutes using ChatGPT and GPT Builder. Watch on X or YouTube, or listen on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

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You can make a video game without writing a single line of code. Logan Kilpatrick and I did it together live on my show. 

Logan is OpenAI’s first developer relations and advocacy hire. A big part of Logan’s job is supporting the community of builders using ChatGPT, DALL-E, and the OpenAI API. He’s also deeply invested in growing this community, convinced that AI tools empower people to build more. 

To prove this point, Logan and I fulfill a childhood dream of ours, to build a video game, live on the show. We use GPT Builder and ChatGPT to create Allocator, a text-based strategy game where players step into the shoes of a historical U.S. president and are tasked with managing the government’s budget. We have an awesome time iterating all the way from rough idea to functional video game in less than one hour—without any coding. It’s an incredible experiment in how AI can bring our creative ideas to life. 

Three months ago, OpenAI released the application that made our video game experiment possible: GPT Builder. This tool enables people to make custom GPTs tailored for pretty much anything they want. Logan believes that GPT Builder is the biggest technological unlock since ChatGPT was released. It reduces the barriers to innovation and building, especially for people who don’t know how to code.  

This episode is a must-watch for anyone who wants to turn their unstructured musings into  tangible output. Here’s a taste:

• Expanding the horizon of who can build things. Logan is excited about GPT Builder because it empowers people who don’t know how to code to build custom GPTs for themselves. “[Y]ou can actually make something that is materially more useful than base ChatGPT itself without writing a single line of code,” he says. 
• Learn how to code! Even though OpenAI is creating tools for people without coding know-how, Logan believes that learning to code is “the highest leverage thing you can do in your life.” AI is already enabling developers to tackle increasingly complex problems both faster and more independently, and he only anticipates this to “exponentially” increase with time.
• Empowering the next billion coders. As the benefits of coding grow, Logan thinks AI will also teach the next billion people how to code. “[T]here w[ere] not enough computer science educators and resources on the planet to teach the next billion people to code… because we have LLMs, people are actually going to be empowered to go and do this in a way that's personalized and empowering to them specifically,” he says.
• GPT Builder is trained on the basics of prompt engineering. We decide to build a video game that allows the player to choose a U.S. president and then allocate that government’s budget. On Logan’s advice, we don’t instruct GPT Builder to refine our rough prompt because, he explains, “[W]e can iterate on it once we've actually gotten what [GPT Builder] outputted, but [GPT Builder] does do a little bit of that…prompt engineering magic behind the scenes for us.” The name we choose for our video game is Allocator, inspired in part by my essay on the age of the allocation economy.