Making a Game Without Any Coding Knowledge

I want to talk a little about the development journey behind CRETA.

Because when I started working on the game you see on Steam today, I had absolutely no coding knowledge.

I want to emphasize that.

I didn’t know a programming language. I didn’t know how game systems were built, how to publish a game on Steam, how to prepare a build, or how I would solve the hundreds of technical problems that would eventually appear in front of me.

I only had one thing:

A game I wanted to make.

And I had AI.

I explained what I wanted, and AI turned those ideas into code.

Most of the time, it actually worked.

Sometimes it didn’t.

Sometimes we fixed one thing and accidentally broke something else.

Sometimes we spent hours chasing a single problem.

But every time, I learned a little more.

Not how to write code.

How to develop a game.

As CRETA grew, I began to understand that game development was about much more than writing code.

Fishing systems, regions, equipment, the economy, research systems, user interfaces, save systems, Steam features, music, visuals…

At some point, what was in front of me was no longer a small experiment.

It was a real game.

But this journey wasn’t only about technical problems.

Sometimes, even I asked myself:

“What if this doesn’t work?”

Sometimes people around me criticized what I was doing.

Sometimes their words affected my motivation.

Sometimes I felt like I couldn’t properly explain the value of what I was trying to create.

There were also people who stood beside me.

People who opened the game, tested it, found bugs, shared ideas, and helped me improve it.

And there were times when I felt that the support I needed simply wasn’t there.

At the same time, life outside the game continued.

There were family problems.

There were financial difficulties.

There were days when life could have pulled my attention completely away from the project.

Sometimes I had to deal with everything else in my life more than I could deal with CRETA itself.

And somewhere in the middle of all of that, I made a decision:

I went back to work.

I started solving the things I didn’t know, one by one.

A problem appeared. I solved it.

Another problem appeared. I solved that too.

Steam review found something missing. I fixed it.

A system broke. I rebuilt it.

People tested the game. I listened.

Criticism came. I considered it.

And I kept going.

The game I once looked at and wondered,

“Can I really do this?”

eventually passed Steam review.

It was released.

And then people I had never met started buying CRETA.

Somewhere else in the world, a person sat down at their computer and played something that had once existed only as an idea in my head.

And I think that was when I understood the most important thing this entire journey had taught me:

I learned game development without learning to code.

I still couldn’t sit down today and teach you a programming language.

But I understand how an idea for a game becomes a working system.

I think about why a mechanic might feel boring.

I am learning when player feedback should be listened to — and when a developer needs to trust their own direction.

When something breaks, instead of giving up, I start looking for the source of the problem.

And now I understand very well that bringing a game to Steam is about much more than simply “writing code.”

Because I learned all of those things by living through them.

AI became an incredible tool throughout this journey.

It could handle technical work that I couldn’t do myself.

It allowed me to turn ideas in my head into working systems.

But it didn’t need to decide what I wanted to create.

AI became my hands.

I gave them direction.

And I think one of the biggest changes AI will bring to the world begins exactly here.

For years, millions of people have had games, films, applications, stories, and entire worlds inside their minds.

But many of them faced one enormous wall:

“I don’t know how to make this.”

Neither did I.

But I made it.

Maybe in the future, the first question we ask a creative person will no longer be:

“What programming language do you know?”

Maybe the question will simply be:

“What do you want to create?”

I want to thank everyone who opened CRETA, tested it, reported bugs, shared ideas, and supported me throughout this journey.

I also want to thank the team at OpenAI and everyone working on the technologies that made it possible for someone with no coding knowledge to build something like this.

CRETA is no longer just a game I made.

For me, it represents the difficult periods of my life, the doubts, the criticism, the experiments, the mistakes, and all the days when I stood back up and returned to work.

And when I look back at the entire journey today, one sentence tells the whole story:

I learned game development without learning to code.

— PrensCin CRETA Developer