Game design brief: a prompt for a playable prototype
From the OpenDrama Create Wiki
This is the paste-ready half of spec first. It comes in two blocks: the brief, which describes your game and changes with every project, and the working rules, which tell the model how to work and stay the same. Paste both as the first message of a new project in an agentic IDE or a coding CLI. A good model answers with questions, then writes a spec file and a milestone plan, and only then starts on code. Any current frontier coding model handles it; it works best in a tool that can run the game and open it in a browser.
What it's for
Use it to start a small game you want people to play: a racing toy, a short 3D exploration story, a push-block puzzle. It replaces the "make me a game where…" paragraph that produces a demo instead of a game. Compared with that paragraph, four things change:
- Questions before code. The model has to list up to five ambiguities, each with a proposed default, and stop. Two minutes of answering saves the rewrite that follows a wrong guess about the camera or the world scale.
- A plan you approve. Six to ten milestones, each playable and testable in under two minutes, each mapped to the acceptance tests it satisfies.
- Scope that can't creep. A
NOT IN THIS VERSIONlist, plus IDEAS.md as a parking lot for the model's own ideas. - Proof, not promises. Every milestone ends with the files changed, how to run it and the status of every test. A read-only
window.__gameobject lets you, or an agent with a browser, read the game state instead of squinting at the screen.
- 01Brief + rulesone paste
- 02Questionsup to 5, with defaults
- 03SPEC.md + planyou approve
- 04Next milestoneone per turn
- 05Check + committests, PROGRESS.md
To fill it in you need a pitch you can say in one sentence and 20 to 30 minutes. If you can't fill Win and NOT IN THIS VERSION, you're not ready to prompt yet; those two empty fields are the most common reason an AI game ends up as a tech demo. For a single-file toy built in one sitting, use the mini brief under Tuning; for a project that already exists, the Resume prompt next to it.
Members read on
The rest of this page is for members
- 5 more steps
- 6 copy-ready prompts
- 2 reference tables
- 6 more sections
Create a free account, top up once — from $0.99 — and the whole wiki is yours.
- Every breakdown, Skill and Prompt
- New pages every day
- Prompts copy in one tap
See also
Breakdowns that use this
More in AI games
View all →An anti-gravity racer in two days: three cups, online lobbies, cars made by players' AI
Stefan rebuilt his childhood favourite, F-Zero X, as the browser racer ZERO-G with AI in two days, and it was played 1,000+ times. Here's the asset pipeline and the design that makes people finish a race.
Day 20 of an AI-built strategy game: a stone golem that wakes up, and a tavern
Stefan is building the strategy game he has wanted for 15 years with AI. Day 20 adds a golem that hides as a pile of rocks and a tavern where you hire fighters. We follow the golem from reference images into Unity.
Desk photos to a playable kart racer: Gemini 4 Argon, Blender MCP and Three.js
genevieve__h from Google AI Studio turned photos of her home-office desk into a kart racing game with Gemini 4 Argon, Blender MCP and Three.js. We rebuild the method frame by frame.
After going viral: how Sky Reach added a Ring world and multiplayer rooms
Tesana says a user's space game, made with a few prompts, went from 2.5M to over 3M views in just over a week. Here's how it added a Ring world and multiplayer without breaking what already worked.
Lyrio: a 3D exploration game built on movement, made with Opus 5.5 and Three.js
A fox-eared scout runs, launches off Wind Springs and glides between floating islands. We break down how the movement set becomes the whole game, and how the collectibles feed it.
