I Made a Flappy Bird Clone Without Writing Code (GPT-4 Only)

The Experiment: I do not know how to write a game engine. I know basic HTML, but physics? Gravity? Hitboxes? No clue. I want to see if I can build a fully playable "Flappy Bird" clone using Zero Manual Code. I will only copy-paste what GPT-4 gives me.

> PROMPT 1: THE FOUNDATION

"Write a single HTML file containing a Flappy Bird clone. It should use HTML5 Canvas. The bird is a yellow square. Pipes are green rectangles. Spacebar to jump."

It generated 100 lines of code. I pasted it into `game.html` and opened it.

Result: A yellow square appeared. It fell to the bottom. I pressed space. Nothing happened. It just sat there.

BUG: Event Listener not attached correctly. Gravity logic flawed.

> PROMPT 2: THE FIX

"The bird isn't jumping. It just falls. Fix the event listener. Also, make the game loop run at 60fps."

New code. I pasted it.

Result: The bird jumped! But it jumped up and never came down. Anti-gravity bird. It flew off the screen into space.

> PROMPT 15: THE PHYSICS STRUGGLE

Physics is hard. GPT-4 kept forgetting to reset the velocity. I had to learn how to speak "Debug."

"The collision detection is wrong. I die before hitting the pipe. Tighten the hitbox."

It took 15 iterations. This wasn't "No Code"; it was "Code Review." I wasn't writing the syntax, but I had to understand the logic to tell it what was wrong.

> THE FINAL CODE (IT WORKS!)

After 2 hours of back-and-forth, we have a working game.

                // The actual logic generated by AI
                function update() {
                bird.velocity += bird.gravity;
                bird.y += bird.velocity;

                if (bird.y + bird.height > canvas.height || bird.y < 0) { resetGame(); } pipes.forEach(pipe=> {
                    pipe.x -= 2;
                    if (bird.x < pipe.x + pipe.width && bird.x + bird.width> pipe.x &&
                        (bird.y < pipe.top || bird.y + bird.height> pipe.bottom)) {
                            resetGame();
                            }
                            });
                            }
            

> PLAYABLE DEMO (CONCEPT)

[CANVAS ELEMENT WOULD BE HERE]
(Use Spacebar)

(Note: I didn't actually embed the script here to avoid breaking the blog layout, but the code exists locally.)

> ANALYSIS

Is "No Code" Real? Yes and No.

Yes: I didn't type `function()`. I didn't look up syntax documentation.

No: I had to think like a programmer. "Why is it falling?" "What is the variable for gravity?" If I didn't understand the concepts, I wouldn't have known what to ask.

Natural Language is becoming a programming language. English is the new C++.

> WHAT'S NEXT?

Flappy Bird is simple. Can it build Doom? Can it build the next Facebook? Not yet. But for a prototype? It's faster than any human engineer I know.