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I Built a Game, Not a Prompt

Matan Dessaur

October 16, 2026 · 4 min read · AI · Technology & Innovation

It started with a little yellow console

Early last year I got my hands on a Playdate. If you've never seen one: it's a tiny yellow handheld with a black-and-white screen and a crank on the side. An actual crank. It has just enough limits to make every idea interesting, and I fell for it fast.

I'm not a game developer. I'm a web developer who plays a lot of games and keeps a notebook full of ideas that were never supposed to leave it. The Playdate made me want to try anyway.

How it actually went

My first game was Parking Spot, written in Lua, the language the Playdate SDK is friendliest with. It ran great in the simulator. On the real device it was a slideshow. So I tuned it, then tried a mix of Lua and C, and finally rewrote the whole thing in C. Every game since has started in C on day one.

Then the next wall: a game needs more than code. It needs sprites, animations, sound effects, music. I can't draw like an illustrator and I'm not a musician. In a studio, this is where a team steps in. I didn't have a team, so I built one in software: Cadence, a desktop tool I made where the AI agents I work with share one brain and help me plan, build and test.

Since February, that turned into five games on itch.io: CRANKFLIP, COA, RAT, Push and Pool and Cranked Metal, with BUREAU on the way.

Apparently, AI is a problem

I get the frustration. I don't like low-effort games pumped out by the dozen either, and I'm tired of the same glossy AI images everywhere.

Panic, the company behind the Playdate, decided in April 2026 that its Catalog won't accept games that use generative AI for art, audio, music, text or dialog. AI help with code is allowed, and gets flagged. My art and sound are drawn and synthesized by code, and AI helped me write a lot of that code. Read their way, that probably puts my games on the wrong side of the line.

I'm not mad at Panic. They're protecting human creativity, and that's worth protecting. But it left me with a question I couldn't shake.

So how did I make them?

Every game starts as a hamster running around in my head. Then it goes on paper: what you do, how it feels, what makes you try one more time. I decide the rules, the levels, the characters, the look, the way a landing should feel.

Then I build it. I read the code, I break it, I test on the device, again and again. AI fills the gaps I can't fill alone, like the code that draws a skater frame by frame, or the code that synthesizes the clack of a typewriter. I didn't use image, video or music generators. Almost all the art and sound comes out of scripts made for each game. AI helped write some of those scripts, and I'm not going to hide that.

I also threw a lot away. A whole book-style interface for the trilogy, gone because it just wasn't it. An entire job in BUREAU, cut because it wasn't fun.

Where's the line?

Platforms don't agree. Steam asks developers to disclose AI-generated content but leaves out the tools that help with development. itch.io lets creators tag what was made with AI instead of banning it. Playdate draws the line further out.

There's a real difference between typing "make me a skate game" and getting a game back, and using AI to build a game you already designed down to the frame. There are real concerns too: energy, copyright, artists losing work. I take those seriously.

Does a chef become less of a chef because of the knife? The analogy isn't perfect. A tool like this can make choices a knife never could. But the question stands.

The idea was always mine

I'm not asking anyone to love AI, and I'm not asking Panic to change its rules. I'm asking people to look past the label.

I didn't ask an AI to dream up a game for me. I had games in my head and I figured out how to build them. The ideas were mine. The decisions were mine. The hundred changes because something didn't feel right? Very much mine.

I make these for people to enjoy. If you want to judge them, judge them fairly: play them first.

Try them

No Playdate yet? Here's where to get one.

So here's my question: if the imagination is human, at what point does using a tool make the creation less human?