Category: Blog

Christmas is right around the corner. While you’re lazing around in the cozy beds, sipping hot chocolate, eating cookies, and planning gifts, there is something fun that you can do for yourself and your family. Pikoo can help you get into the Christmas spirit by creating Christmas-specific games.

Let us show you how we created a simple, engaging game for everyone in the family to play with an AI game generator. The rules are simple. There are a few buttons and a large, colorful image of Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer. Of all the buttons, only one lights up the nose of Rudolph and makes him say nice things, and the rest are just mildly snarky remarks. You can press any button until you find the right button. Another way to play it is to pass the mobile phone around the family, and whoever has it presses a button. If they get it right, they take a shot (of hot chocolate); if not, broccoli?

Steps to create games from text

So to make this game, I entered the prompt:

Initial prompt:

Design a game in which you must find the correct button to illuminate Rudolph the reindeer’s nose. When the nose lights up, Rudolph says nice things. When it’s the wrong button, it’s slightly snarky.

System’s response:

Hi! That’s a super cute idea, I love it. Let’s make Rudolph’s nose light up!

First, let’s figure out the basics together.

For now, imagine something like this:

You see Rudolph on the screen

There are several buttons (or colored circles)

Only ONE of them is the “magic” button

When you click the correct one, his red nose lights up, and he may smile, or a message appears, such as “You found it!”

Let me ask you just one thing to start:

Do you want it to look more like:

A – A simple screen with Rudolph and some regular buttons with text (like “Button 1, Button 2, Button 3…”)

or

B –  Some colorful shapes or icons (like stars or circles) that you can click to try and find the right one?

Just answer “A” or “B” (or describe your own idea), and then I’ll show you an ASCII preview of how the game will look!

My response 1:

Make it very colorful and bright.

System’s response:

Nice! Colorful and bright Rudolph button game coming up 😄

Let me ask just one simple thing so I get it right:

Do you imagine the buttons as:

A – Colorful circles (like red, blue, green, yellow dots)
B – Fun shapes (stars, hearts, snowflakes, etc.)

You can just say “A” or “B” (or mix them, like “colorful circles and one star”).

While you think, here’s a quick preview of what I’m imagining:

YOUR GAME DESIGN

What you’ll make:

A bright, colorful screen with Rudolph in the middle, lots of colorful buttons around, and you have to click to find the one that lights up his nose.

• The Setup: You control: Your mouse (clicking buttons)
• Goal: Find the correct button that makes Rudolph’s nose glow bright red
• Watch out for: Nothing dangerous, but many wrong buttons that just do nothing or say “Try again!”
• Controls: Click with your mouse or tap on the screen (if on mobile)

HERE’S YOUR GAME!

Does this look right for you: Rudolph in the center, lots of bright, colorful clickable shapes around him, and one of them lights his nose?

If yes, just say:

“looks good” (and tell me A or B for circles vs shapes)

Then I’ll build the full playable game that you can just open and play.

My response 2:

Looks good.

AND THAT’S IT! That’s all it took to get me the game I wanted. 

I got this colorful game, which I can literally play with my grandma and my nephew– all on the same table.

You can now go to Pikoo and try making different Christmas games yourself. If you’re feeling lazy, here are some example prompts and game screenshots.

1. A simple game involving a Christmas tree and a collection of ornaments. You can hang the decorations on the tree. When you press complete, you can share or take a screenshot of the tree image.

2. Create a game in which you gently float Santa above the houses and land him on the Chimneys. When you land him on three chimneys, you win and receive a bright, merry Christmas greeting.

Have fun! Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays!!!

We interviewed 100+ users who love making games. These are NOT just professionals but also young individuals who make games on platforms like Roblox and Minecraft. These are curious and highly creative people who we don’t hear about regularly. While “What is wrong with Roblox” is a blog in and of itself, we will keep that for another time. Let’s keep this on why people want to make games:

1. To make a popular game
2. To make money
3. To get the joy of creation
4. To have fun with games
5. To express themselves and tell stories
6. To experiment with game ideas
7. To challenge themselves and gain mastery
8. To share games with friends
9. To learn the basics of game design
10. To socialize and develop collaboratively
11. To learn the basics of programming

Let’s go one by one:

1. To make a popular game:

This is the absolute and most common reason we heard from literally everyone. From the very young to the most experienced game developers. Everyone wants to make a game so that many people can play it. The definition of “a lot” varied from 10 people to 10 million people for different people, but the emotion was always about a lot. 

2. To make money:

The young kids want to make a career in games, the professionals wish to grow, and the indie developers want to make money by selling their games or copies thereof. 

3. To get the joy of creation:

Fame and money are the most common reasons that we want to do anything, but beyond that, creativity is an innate desire. The kids want to make games because they enjoy making games. They enjoy the sandbox nature of building. 

4. To have fun with games:

Everyone who makes games just loves games. They also typically love to play their games. 

5. To express themselves and tell stories:

We see games as a means of storytelling. And that’s one of the reasons why people make games. They want to make a game about helping older adults, about how their parents help them during camping, or just a cool homework assignment—games as a means of storytelling. 

6. To experiment with game ideas:

Kids love sandbox. Experiment with different ideas. Different projects. They want to know what a GTA set in Delhi would look like, or what Subway Surfers would be like if mom is chasing you with milk. Or what would games be if I have very little time to solve a puzzle to understand how to fly a plane.  

7. To challenge themselves and gain mastery:

The folks who are a bit more experimental, who have made even a 30-second game in the past using templates or simple languages like Scratch, just enjoy making games like a sport. And they want to do it more to gain mastery over it. 

8. To share games with friends:

This is a more personal version of popularity that the users seek. They want to make games that are specific to their friend group. Something akin to internal jokes. 

9. Learning the basics of game design:

Users in the 16-24 age bracket have a nuanced understanding of socials, storytelling, and game design as a discipline. For them, making games is another way to learn game design. Quite a few of them have previously watched videos on how to make games, or what game design is, and what level design is. They are always looking for tools and teammates to help test their ideas. 

10. Socialize and build collaboratively:

This set of users can be classified as curious nerds. They’re not alone in wanting to experiment with ideas, but they have groups of friends. These groups often take the form of Discord or WhatsApp/Instagram chats. They exchange memes, create them, play some games together, and literally experiment with strategies. They want to have something digital to do together. Some of them have a regular schedule of coming back from school, sitting together on Minecraft, and building their worlds. This group of users wants their ideas to come to life as they hang out on a group chat. 

11. Learn the basics of programming:

This was a fascinating observation. Quite a few students or potential users who wanted to get into game design actually had the notion that learning game design meant learning programming. When we dug deeper into their thought process, we found that this perception was a consequence of past trauma from trying to make games or attending coding courses in the name of game design. 

These are some of the insights we got from interviewing aspiring game designers. We’ll be putting them into a jobs-to-be-done framework and making some comparisons with existing products. We will see which product decisions this shapes up for us and how we define product requirements based on this. Till then, if anyone asks you why kids even want to make a game. You can point them here. 

Game creation is one of the most intimidating creative endeavors we have today.

The Evolution

Part of this stems from the relatively recent emergence of video games as a medium. They’ve literally only existed for 40–50 years. That’s nothing compared to writing, music, or visual art. And yet, in that short span of time, games have evolved at an unusually rapid pace, coupled with technological advances across many fields.

To make even a reasonably good game today, you need to navigate multiple digital disciplines at once. Graphic design. UI. Animation. Sound design. Programming. Game mechanics. Player psychology. Level design. Distribution. Each of these fields evolves independently, and an innovation in any of them can suddenly shift what’s possible and who gets to make it happen. The frequency of these advances is every few weeks.

The result is predictable.

The Change

Almost no one has enough skills to make great games entirely on their own. Very few people have sufficient clarity, confidence, or access to resources to conceptualize a game and assemble the right team to bring it to life. Game creation can feel inaccessible, even to people who deeply love games.

In that sense, game creation today looks a lot like video creation did in the early 2000s.

In the past, making a video required expensive equipment, specialized software, and technical expertise. Most people were consumers, and a select few were creators. The desire to create existed, but the barriers were too high. Over time, that changed because technology advanced and reduced the cost of experimentation.

This is a pattern we’ve seen repeatedly.

When the internet became mainstream in the early 90s, it democratized text. Publishing shifted from institutions to individuals with access to a computer. Digital cameras and tools like Photoshop did the same for images. Smartphones with high-quality cameras and enough storage did it for video. Each time, a new content format emerged alongside existing ones, slightly reshaped behavior, and participation occurred at unprecedented scales.

Games are next.

The Future 

Generative AI is the technological shift that enables this. While it entered the public imagination roughly four or five years ago, it’s only now reaching a point where real, practical use cases are coming together. The tools are becoming reliable enough, fast enough, and flexible enough to assist creation rather than just demonstrate novelty.

If history is any indication, the democratization of a content format is rarely about creation tools alone. It usually leads to the emergence of a new social platform built around that format. Facebook rode the wave of text and images. TikTok rode the wave of short-form video.

The stage is now set for the next shift centered around games.

Users from all walks of life create games with no constraints. Sharing them, remixing them, and treating games as everyday expressions of creativity.

That’s the direction this medium is heading. That’s what we’re building.

The title of this blog already indicates that it is about building an AI platform for game development. We break it down into a few pieces: 

1. Is it possible to develop games from text through AI?
2. Why do we need easy game creation via AI?
3. Conceptualizing the AI platform for game creation

1. Is it possible to develop games from text through AI?

Over the past 3 years, AI has evolved significantly.

Generative AI models have become better at handling large amounts of context, reasoning across it, and remaining coherent over long stretches of work. Furthermore, agentic systems are improving at breaking vague intent into concrete tasks and executing them step by step.

Coding, which used to be a hard gate, is becoming less so. Models are writing cleaner code, understanding intent better, and correcting themselves faster. We’re seeing products like Lovable, Bolt, and others doing a reasonably good job at creating websites and applications end-to-end. Tools like Codex and Claude Code are also pushing deeper into backend workflows.

Putting all of this together with a mindset focused more on creativity and fun than on pure financial output, we see that anyone can start creating games. Quickly.

The answer to whether text-to-game AI is possible is yes. 

2. Why do we need easy game creation via AI?

Traditionally, game creation has been one of the most multidisciplinary creative acts. You need to code. You need to design. You need to consider levels, pacing, audio, feedback, difficulty curves, and player psychology. Very few individuals are proficient in all of this, creating a high barrier to entry. 

This barrier stops millions of possible creators. We, as humans, have been playing make-believe games ever since we began to speak. We like to make our own games. Whether it’s jumping on steps, the rock-paper-scissors, or even the game of keeping the ball in the air for the most number of catches. We develop rules, mechanics, and difficulty levels for games. This ability should not be stripped away solely because our interactions are digital. We should be able to play games that we invent with the people we like on the spur of the moment in the digital world.

3. Conceptualizing the AI platform for game creation 

We can make game creation easy with Generative AI. We make exploration easy and minimize the cost of failure. You can try. You can be bad. You can iterate. If you do it quickly and consistently with the intent to improve, you can be effective.

There should exist a game creation and distribution platform where making a game feels as natural as typing out an idea. Where you can vibe-code a game, not worry too much about whether you’re “doing it right,” and instantly share it with your friends. They don’t need to download SDKs or read docs. They just play.

At the same time, some people don’t want to create. They want to explore. They want to experience others’ creativity. Play games made by their friends. Discover games aligned with their interests. Hang out in a space where games are not just products but expressions.

Creation on one side. Consumption, on the other hand. And a tight loop between the two. This is what an AI platform for game creation should be. 

Today is Day 0 for us.

We’re just starting. There’s a website. There’s a very rough, very rudimentary prototype that barely hints at where this could go.

As we build, we want to keep this conversation open. Share what we’re learning. Share what we’re getting wrong. And slowly, together, figure out what it means to live in a world where making games is no longer a privilege of the few, but a playground for many.