Game building platform, with AI

Couple of years back, starting investigating & digitalizing old toys, I was already dreaming of using these toys in an actual building game. At that point in time, the least-amount-of-resistance, was using LeoCAD and just change the parts library. This resulted into a 'simple' way of only focusing on the assets (toy parts) and leave the software apart.

During this period, visualizations methods keep improving too, especially formats like GLB etc. And today we all have also access to AI, which is very fast in generating a lot of code.

So after generating 20+ sets of toy assets, its time to write my own building game engine, together with Claude-Code. But how to continue?

Gaming software platforms...

Although I'm not going to spoil everything about the game itselves, the first step is what kind of software to use and how to connect with AI. Although you could program a complete 3D building game from scratch in Python or an other standard program language. This might be way more simple/logical doing this inside a game engine, since that's what I've in mind. Since the big game engines like Unity & Unreal seem to have a big learning curve, I only tested Godot & Roblox sofar. (Our child is playing Roblox, so good excuse to see what is going on.)

So converted some library parts & buildings into GLB parts and these could directly being used in both game engines. Both engines were quite easy to configure and being able to create a basic building game.

Roblox trial

So let's start with Roblox. Importing a building was quite easy and when pressing the 'play game' button, the building did collapse at once. Nice, so need to know something about 'anchoring', 'collisions', 'models' etc. Fine, after a while and maybe 2 fresh re-starts, it's actually quite simple to build a building game:

It's amazing, the amount of effort versus the amount of outcome!
It's still far from perfect (it's only a concept), but having already many features 'proven'.

Godot trial

After some iterations with Godot, you could do the exact same thing. But now you need a bit more effort. Although I did upload a Godot trial to my website, I'm able to play 'online', but it's still an app, like it would be installed on your pc.

Learnings

Both game engines are definitely working for the building game I'm having in mind. With Roblox you get a lot of extras for free: multiplayer, online gaming, in-game chatting (incl. translation) and even speaking. That's all still missing inside current Godot concept game.

What is lacking too, especially in Godot: good looking environment.
So need some experience, getting the appearance at a higher level. Let's try to create some movies...

If it's still fun, I'll return to game making...