I made my first game with Stacia (@pvp_vibe @ZARGATES). And I have absolutely zero game development experience. 😅

I just wanted to give it a try, play around with it, and see what this AI game builder could actually do. Turns out, there's a lot more to it than I expected.

First off, if you're someone who doesn't know the first thing about game development but has a wild imagination (speaking generally, of course, not about myself 😏), Stacia is a pretty cool tool.

It took about 25 minutes to generate my initial game. But here's where things get interesting.

Once your game is created, you can fine-tune pretty much everything: damage, speed, when enemies appear, which enemies show up, and so on. And I mean A LOT of stuff.

You can change backgrounds, replace characters with pretty much anything you want, and customize all sorts of things. And all of that is free. At least, I wasn't charged anything for those changes.

There's also a paid side. You can spend credits to improve what you've created and really bring your game to life. Better visuals, smoother animations, more natural character movements, even little details like flags fluttering in the wind.

I went all-in on the paid upgrades available inside Stacia. I also touched up some of the artwork using tools outside the platform.

Overall, the editor feels pretty intuitive. But just in case you get stuck, there's an AI chat built right into it. You can literally tell the AI what you want changed in your game, and it'll make the edits for you.

Maybe it can't do absolutely everything, but I haven't tested all its limits yet.

Another interesting feature is game analysis.

There's a button that lets the AI analyze your game and tell you what might need fixing. For example, it might point out that your game is too difficult right from the start and suggest specific values to adjust.

Or it might notice that you've crammed too many bosses into one round and recommend spreading them out so the difficulty increases more gradually as players progress.

Pretty useful, especially if you're like me and don't really know much about game balancing.

To be clear, I haven't seriously messed around with balancing my own game yet. Just made a few small adjustments here and there. I'll dig into all of that later.

Oh, and here's another nice perk. 😁

As the creator, you can playtest your game as much as you want for free. After every little change, you can jump right back in and see how everything looks and plays.

That said, I still played my game once in the paid mode. Fair's fair. 😎

And one more thing.

I deliberately avoided making anything too scary. I figured someone might want to let their kid play, and the last thing they need is a game full of boobs and death. 🫠

So I went with the cutest characters I could come up with. There's a little blood in one spot, though, but hopefully I can fix that in the settings too.

Anyway, that's my first impression of Stacia after making my very first game.

There's still a ton of stuff I haven't explored, but so far, it's been a pretty interesting experience, especially for someone who's never made a game before.

Thanks for reading! And if you give my game a try, let me know what you think.

Link to the game in the first reply! 👇