# AI game making glossary This page: https://www.teleplay.ai/glossary Updated: 2026-11-07 ## Quick answer 30 terms you meet when you make games with AI, each explained in a few plain sentences. Where a word means something specific on Teleplay, such as the plan or retuning, the entry says so. Every term has its own link, so you can point somebody straight at it. ## See the terms in real games - [Stormlight Catcher](https://www.teleplay.ai/play/stormlight-catcher-70a54cae): Dodger - [Manor of Whispers](https://www.teleplay.ai/play/manor-of-whispers-e0a80c84): Top-down action - [Moonlit Acorns](https://www.teleplay.ai/play/moonlit-acorns-7fefc83a): Platformer ## The terms **AI game maker**: A tool that turns a description in plain language into a game. Some produce a project you continue in an engine, others a finished game that is hosted for you. Teleplay is the second kind. **Prompt**: What you type to ask an AI for something. For a game, a good prompt says who you play, what you do and how you win or lose, and leaves the engineering out. **Prompt-to-game**: The idea of going straight from a prompt to something playable, with no editor in between. The hard part isn't producing code, it is producing a game that actually works when somebody plays it. **Vibe coding**: Building software by describing what you want and steering an AI by feel, rather than writing the code. People use the phrase for games too, usually with the code still in view. **The plan (brief)**: On Teleplay, the short description shown before anything is built: what the game is, how it is won and lost, what is in it and how it looks. It is your chance to catch a misunderstanding before the build rather than after it. **Game engine**: The software underneath a game: it draws, plays sound, reads the controls and runs physics. Godot, Unity and Phaser are engines. An AI game maker may hide the engine from you entirely. **Game loop**: The cycle a game repeats many times a second: read input, update the world, draw the frame. In design talk it also means what a player does again and again, such as fight, loot, upgrade. **Sprite**: A 2D picture that moves as one object: a hero, a coin, a bullet. Several drawings of the same sprite in a row make it animate. **Sprite sheet**: One image holding many frames of a sprite, laid out on a grid, so a game can load them together and step through them. **Tilemap**: A level built from small repeating squares, like a mosaic. Platformers and top-down games use them because a large world can be stored as a small grid of numbers. **Hitbox**: The invisible shape a game uses to decide whether two things touch. Usually a little smaller than the drawing, so near misses feel fair to the player. **Collision**: The moment two hitboxes overlap, and what the game does about it: stop the player at a wall, take away health, pick up a coin. **Spawn**: To make something appear in the game while it runs. A spawn point is where it appears, and a spawn rate is how often. **Wave**: A group of enemies sent together, usually with a pause before the next. Waves give action and tower defense games their rhythm of pressure and rest. **Boss**: A single, strong enemy that tests what the player has learned, typically at the end of a level. A boss with one clear attack pattern is often better than one with many vague ones. **Power-up**: A pickup that changes what you can do for a while, like a shield or a faster shot. Short ones create moments of risk; permanent ones create a sense of progress. **Difficulty curve**: How hard a game gets over time. Good curves rise with small rests in between. A curve that is too steep ends every run at the same moment. **Procedural generation**: Having code build levels or content by rule rather than by hand, so that each run differs. It is older than today's AI and much cheaper at run time. **NPC**: A non-player character: anyone in a game who isn't controlled by a player, from a shopkeeper to a passing villager. **Play-test**: Playing a game to find out whether it works. On Teleplay, a headless browser plays every new build and checks it against the rules the game declared, before anybody else can open it. **Retune**: On Teleplay, changing a running game's settings, such as speed, jump, health or colors, with sliders beside it. The changes stay in your browser tab and nobody else sees them. **Remix**: Making your own copy of someone's game and changing the copy. The original stays as it was. **Game asset**: Any finished part a game uses: a model, a sprite, a sound, a texture. Asset generators make these parts; they don't make the game around them. **GLB**: A single-file format for 3D models, the binary form of glTF, holding geometry, materials, textures and animation. Most 3D tools and web viewers read it. **Pixel art**: Art drawn on a coarse grid where every square is placed on purpose, with a small palette. Pictures that only look like it often have blurred edges and a wandering grid. **Palette**: The limited set of colors a picture or a game uses. A small shared palette is what makes separate pictures look as if they belong to one world. **Room code**: On Teleplay, the 6-character code of a multiplayer room. Anyone who types it can join, as long as a seat is open and the round hasn't started. **Lobby**: The waiting screen before a round, showing who is in. On Teleplay the seats are taken here, and the host starts the round when everyone is ready. **Latency (ping)**: The time a message takes to reach the server and come back, in milliseconds. High latency makes a game feel late, whatever your frame rate. **Relay server**: A server that passes game messages between players, so they don't connect to each other directly. Choosing one near the players keeps latency down. ## Questions **What is the difference between an AI game maker and a game engine?** An engine is software you build a game with yourself. An AI game maker builds the game from your description, sometimes on top of an engine you never see. **Do I need to know these words to make a game?** No. You describe a game in everyday language. They help when you want to be precise about a change, for example asking for a smaller hitbox. **What does play-tested mean here?** A headless browser played the build through before it was published. A game the checks still find problems in when its build ends starts at Only me, with what they found: its maker can play it and choose to share it. A game that does not start is not published. **Is a sprite the same as a game asset?** A sprite is one kind of asset. Sounds, 3D models and textures are assets too. ## Read next - [How to make a snake game with AI](https://www.teleplay.ai/guides/how-to-make-a-snake-game-with-ai) - [How to make a tower defense game with AI](https://www.teleplay.ai/guides/how-to-make-a-tower-defense-game-with-ai) - [Pixel art cleaner: snap AI art to its true grid](https://www.teleplay.ai/tools/pixel-art-cleaner) - [GLB viewer: open a model, see what is in it](https://www.teleplay.ai/tools/glb-viewer) - [How a game gets made on Teleplay](https://www.teleplay.ai/how-it-works)