ARTICLE
I’ve been a huge fan of Nier:Automata since its release in 2017. I’ve probably played it three or four times. The music, characters and story are incredibly emotional. It was also the first game I saw that combined various genres of games into one.
For February, I decided to design and build a gaming-related website as a way to show my appreciation for Nier:Automata.
How did it all begin?
When creating custom animations or anything involving coding, I’ve mostly relied on AI. I’ve kept up with the latest releases and what’s possible to build. I’ve built some agents using ClickUp, but they’re limited to the ClickUp application itself.
I came across posts about creating automations using n8n, which can access information from multiple apps. This would be incredibly useful and save a lot of time. I got hooked on the idea and started searching for AI-integrated IDEs. This led me to CLI (Command Line Interface) tools, then Blender CLI and somehow to Codex. GPT 5.3 model was recently announced for Codex and I thought, “Why not create a simple game website that also includes a game that people can play directly from the website itself?”
First iteration of the game in ChatGPT
I designed the website and built all the sections in Framer. The only remaining task was to create the game. This game is already present in Nier:Automata as the ending credits. It appeared quite simple to recreate in a browser without any lag or stutter. I was curious to test if there were any significant differences between building this game using ChatGPT and in Codex.
So, I opened the game, recorded a short clip of playing it, uploaded the clip to ChatGPT and explained how it works and what I want. The result was… well not what I expected. It resembled Space Invaders more! While it wasn't an exact or even close match, but it was still a working game.
Using Codex
This was my first time using the Codex app. I’ve always used VS Code with ChatGPT’s ‘Work with’ function, which worked great. I never felt the need to try out Codex as a standalone app or using it within VS Code. However, since creating a game might be a bit complex, I decided to install Codex, set it up, add the necessary skills and started working on it.
I did try out Claude Opus 4.6. It's the latest model from Anthropic and better at reasoning. But since I’ve been a long-time user of OpenAI, I knew it would understand my work and the way I ask for answers. Besides, I already had an OpenAI subscription, so I decided to stick with it.
Building the game in Codex
After witnessing the result in ChatGPT, I wasn’t particularly optimistic about Codex. However, I did notice one difference: Codex doesn’t support video uploads. So, I took five different screenshots of various parts of the game and uploaded them, providing detailed explanations for each image. I also wrote down my requirements and needs for this project. It took approximately 4 to 5 minutes to complete this process, and the result was far better than I had anticipated! It felt almost identical to the original game, except for the absence of flashy animations.
I incorporated this code component into Framer and tested it and it functioned flawlessly! I was genuinely surprised by the outcome in just one attempt.
Minor adjustments and final result
It took me a few more hours to make some final adjustments. I added fallbacks, customized the game to closely match the actual game as much as possible on a browser and ensured that every element could be controlled and customized directly from the properties panel without editing the code. While there wasn’t a significant difference from the initial iteration created in Codex, which was already quite similar, I genuinely believe, making it resemble exactly like the original game is possible using AI.