How AI games are made: one prompt to eight agents

Creators make AI games by describing what they want to an AI coding tool and steering what comes back, sometimes for one prompt and sometimes for weeks. Most stick to one tool. As of September 30, 2026, 354 of the 404 games we list name exactly one. The most named are Claude Code with 169 games, Cursor with 86 and Codex with 73.

The stories below come from the creators. For Vibe Jam 2026 entries, that means what they wrote on the jam’s submission form, as summarized in our catalog. For the rest, it means their own READMEs, linked where we quote them.

One sentence, one game

The shortest builds start and end with one request. Arkanoid Neon is a neon brick breaker. Jack-c3l2w’s README says Claude Opus 5.5 built the whole game through Claude Code: code, graphics, sound, music and levels.

The request was one sentence in Swedish: “bygg ett riktigt snyggt Arkanoid-spel som jag kan spela på min dator”. In English: build a really nice-looking Arkanoid game I can play on my computer.

Little Flock, a multiplayer sheep-farming game, went bigger in one pass. “This game was created one-shot by GPT 6 Astra in Codex, using a single /goal run,” its creator, songkeys, writes in the README.

The goal covered the 3D world, game systems, a multiplayer server, artwork, audio and deployment. The prompt tells the agent to solve problems on its own, because the creator won’t step in until the end, and asks for a result that astonishes.

Some one-prompt starts keep growing. Hollow Crown is now a pixel RPG with five classes and a three-stage boss. Its creator, rehan-remade, traces it back in the README. “It started as a single prompt: animate a pixel-art wizard casting a spell, in pure code.” The README adds: “No hand-drawn assets.”

Four prompts and a second opinion

Chess3dastra publishes every prompt it took. Its creator, yortch, built it in the GitHub Copilot app as a test of GPT-6 Astra, and the README lists all four:

1. “Build a 3D Chess that I can play against computer”
2. “looks great, add a 2D view”
3. “/rubber-duck implementation”
4. “Implement all 3 suggestions”

About 41 minutes passed from the first response to the last. The third prompt asked a second, independent agent to critique the code with nothing but the source files. It found three problems. The most serious: if WebGL failed to start, the whole board vanished, 2D view included.

The README is honest about what got through. After playing the live game, the creator spotted that the 3D knights weren’t turned sideways like the 2D ones. Neither the model nor the review pass caught it. Knowing a chess board did.

Days, weeks and years

Jam builds took from days to weeks, according to the creators.

Game	Tool	Build time, per the creator
Shoot or Die	Claude Code	A day and a half on game, server and bug fixes, then a day and a half on polish and deployment
Kanso	Codex	About a week
Doctrine	Cursor	About two weeks
Rift Wars	Not named	Under 15 days, one developer
Frenchieland Frenchies	Claude Code	About three and a half weeks

Some ideas waited longer than their builds did. Doctrine’s creator says the idea had been in their head for years, and Frenchieland Frenchies came after more than three years of thinking about it. Kanso, the week-long build, placed ninth of 945 and won the jam’s Most Zen award.

Splitting the work

Some creators split the job between models or agents, each with its own lane. Ombres goes furthest: its README describes about 35 hours of autonomous agent time, run as multi-agent workflows in Claude Code.

The README lists eight agents, one per area: simulation, bots, world rendering, birds and effects, network and phone app, audio, narrator and computer UI. Each wrote only in its own folders and filed requests when it needed a change elsewhere.

A human still set the direction. Brieuc Crosson wrote the brief, supervised and built the deployment. One of the calls the README lists, asking whether the missing anti-aliasing was intentional, led to a fix. The README in briossant’s repository sums it up: “No line of code in this repository was written by a human, but the project is not human-free.”

Others split by task:

• BoneCrawler: Claude, ChatGPT and Codex wrote the code, Gemini helped plan, and the creator directed the scope and tested the results.
• Cybertaxi: Codex for the game, Suno for music and ElevenLabs for spoken dialog.
• VideoVideoGame: Claude Code for the game, Seedance for more than 100 video scenes, and images from the new GPT image model and Nano Banana 2. It placed 60th.
• Survive Coders: “Built with Claude Code (Claude Opus 5.5) as a pair programmer; commits carry Co-Authored-By trailers,” says travisstephenfraser’s README.

Other creators keep everything in code. In Pro Skater: The Warehouse, Python scripts in Blender 5.2 build every 3D asset, from the skater to the whole park, according to 3D-Stories’ README. Not one sound file ships with it: all of its audio is synthesized in GDScript when the game starts.

Casa de Gemas left all the code to the model. It “was built entirely through conversation with Claude Opus 5.5 in Cursor — no code written by hand,” according to deepujain’s README.

Who is typing

The creators range from people who haven’t coded in decades to working game designers. According to their jam entries:

• Rainy Day Sort’s creator hadn’t written code since around 2001 and used the project to learn vibe coding by doing, with Claude Code and Gemini.
• The Lighter Path’s creator says they couldn’t have made it without vibe coding, since they are not an engineer.
• Shade Chasers’ creator started learning Three.js only days before the jam was announced.
• Floppy Brawler’s creator is a web developer who uses AI daily at work. The game placed 13th.
• Shoot or Die’s creator is an experienced UEFN and Unity developer who had never made a Three.js game before.
• BEATBACK’s creator is a game designer with seven years of experience, who describes AI as a collaborator that amplifies a designer’s taste.

Mobius Strip’s creator puts it another way: they used AI like a brush rather than a shortcut, on art, animation, audio and polish, the areas they say they are weaker in.

What went wrong, and what went right

The entries are candid about what went wrong. Floppy Brawler exists because the very first output from Claude, on day one, inspired the project. Its creator now thinks that early version looks terrible.

Ranger Danger’s creator tried several one-shot ideas and kept the most fun loop. Sea Control - Cold War Arena added multiplayer as a later step. Frenchieland Frenchies’ creator calls it unfinished but a start, and says their kid enjoys it.

Code Rage turned the problem into the game. It came from AI-coded projects that ship with odd glitches, where a bug and a feature are hard to tell apart, and it makes deciding which glitch to fix the core loop. On the bright side, Hollywood Link’s creator was surprised at how reliably AI produced good quiz questions that fit the format they had designed.

Made something? Submit your game: the form has a “How you made it” box for exactly this kind of story. Building your first one? Try how to make a game with AI or the prompts guide.