Tips for writing better game prompts
Practical prompt-writing tips for CityVibe3D: one genre, explicit controls, a real place in the city, and follow-up prompts that fix one problem at a time.
Say the genre before the atmosphere
CityVibe3D turns a prompt into game code and a 3D scene. Atmosphere words (“moody,” “cinematic,” “vibrant”) change colors. Genre words change the code. Lead with the genre: racing, endless runner, flight, or a simple on-foot exploration. Then add the mood. A prompt that is only mood produces a city you can look at and a script that does not know what the player is supposed to do. A prompt that leads with the verb produces controls, a camera, and a place to move.
Use words the editor already understands. Buildings, roads, bridges, regions, characters, and animations are real tools in CityVibe3D. If you name them, you are pointing at objects you can edit afterward. “A dense downtown with a river bridge and a highway on-ramp” maps onto those tools. “A surreal non-euclidean dreamscape with no ground” fights the city editor. You can still ask for unusual colors and lighting. Keep the ground as a city the tools can represent.
Write the controls in the prompt
Players cannot read your prompt. The game still needs to implement what you meant. Write the keys. “Arrow keys steer, space boosts, there is no reverse” is clearer than “intuitive driving.” “The runner moves forward on their own; left and right change lanes; up jumps” is clearer than “parkour.” The generated script has live parameters. If you named a speed, you can change the number later. If you never named a control, the first playtest is you discovering what the model guessed.
Mention the camera in the same sentence as the controls. The person steering needs to see the road. “Third-person camera behind the car” is enough. Avoid stacking three camera modes in the first prompt. You can ask for a change after you have played: “Raise the camera so the next intersection is visible.” That follow-up is easier for the model than a first prompt that describes every exception.
Constrain the place
A city prompt without a boundary generates more city than your game uses, and the player spawns in the middle of it with no goal. Set a boundary. One avenue. Three blocks. A bridge between two shores. A rooftop route on a single row of buildings. Boundaries also make performance and readability better: fewer buildings in frame, a clearer silhouette, a start and an end you can point at.
Give one landmark a job. The finish line is the bridge. The hazard is the oncoming lane. The score pickup is the row of lamps. When every object is decoration, the prompt has nothing to attach rules to. When one object is the goal, both the scene and the script have a target. You can still make that bridge look good in the bridge editor after the prompt, because the generated environment stays editable.
Fix one problem per follow-up
The second prompt is where most games get worse or better. Worse: “Make it more fun, more realistic, add police, add a story, and change the art style.” Better: “The car spawns inside a building. Move the start onto the road, facing the bridge.” One defect, one instruction. CityVibe3D already wrote a body of code and a scene. A narrow follow-up edits that work. A second full game idea replaces it.
If the result is close, stop prompting and use the editors. Change building height, road width, or a material by hand. Hand edits are predictable. A prompt is a good tool when the change is structural: add a jump, slow the traffic, put a timer on screen. It is a clumsy tool when you want the third window from the left to be blue. Use the building editor for the window.
Describe failure and the thing you will not include
Say how a run ends. “Hitting traffic ends the run and shows the score. There is no combat.” Negative constraints save you from a script that adds a weapon because many games have one. Say the scoring rule in numbers if you can: “One point per second survived, five points for a near miss.” Vague rewards (“make it rewarding”) do not become UI.
Read the prompt once as if you had never seen the city. If a stranger could not play from your paragraph, add the missing sentence before you generate. The tips that matter are all in that read-through: genre first, keys named, one place with an edge, one goal, one way to fail, and follow-ups that each fix a single thing you saw while playing.
When you are ready to try it, open the CityVibe3D home page and launch the editor.