Spec first: getting a playable game out of an AI model
From the OpenDrama Create Wiki
Ask a coding model for "a racing game" and you get something that runs but doesn't play: a box slides across an endless plane, there's no lap and no finish, and the camera clips through the first wall. The model isn't the problem. A one-line prompt leaves a dozen design decisions open, and the model fills each one with the most generic answer it knows.
Spec first fixes that in two moves. You write a one-page spec that pins down the core loop, controls, win and lose, camera, feel numbers, what's out of scope and how you'll test it. Then you build in small milestones, each one played, checked and committed before the next. This page covers what goes into the spec, how big a step should be and when to restart. The fill-in prompt version is the game design brief.
- 01Pitchone sentence + the first 60 s
- 02Specloop, controls, rules, camera, limits, tests
- 03Plan6–10 playable milestones
- 04Buildone milestone per request
- 05Verifyplay 2 min, run the checks, commit
When to use it
Use it whenever you want something people can actually play rather than a tech demo: a browser racing toy, a short 3D exploration story, a puzzle with a dozen levels, a jam entry. It's worth it as soon as a project needs more than one session, because the spec file is the only memory that survives a new chat.
You need it if this sounds familiar:
- The model keeps "improving" things you never asked for: menus, particles, a shop.
- Every fix breaks something that worked an hour ago.
- After two hours there are 3,000 lines of code and still no way to win.
- The game runs at different speeds on different screens, or not at all on a phone.
- You can't say whether it's finished, because "finished" was never written down.
Skip it for one-shot experiments: a shader toy, a 20-minute "can it do this?" test. A plain prompt is faster there. For jam toys, the ten-line mini brief on the game design brief page is the middle path.
The cost is 30 to 45 minutes of writing before any code. In return the model stops guessing, every step has a pass/fail check, and a broken step costs one git revert instead of an afternoon.
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- 13 more steps
- 1 copy-ready prompts
- 2 reference tables
- 6 more sections
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See also
Breakdowns that use this
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