The Parent Developer's Guide to Building Games With AI

My son and I recently built a delivery truck maze. You drive delivery trucks through a maze of city streets to the right destination (bread truck to the bakery, flowers to the flower shop). There’s sparkles and audio feedback when you complete a delivery, points awarded, and increasing maze difficulty with each level. I’ve been a developer for over a decade — web apps, APIs, infrastructure — but game dev always felt like a different discipline. Engines, physics libraries, sprite sheets. Then my three-year-old said “make me a game where a red car goes fast” and I opened Claude instead of Unity. We made it. It was playable. He loved it. We’ve built dozens since. Here’s everything I’ve learned about the process. What You Actually Need An AI chatbot. Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini — any of the major ones. The technique is the same across all of them. A web browser. That’s it. We build simple HTML/CSS/JavaScript games that run in a browser tab. Completely sufficient for young kids. No installs. No