It’s the sparring partner you’ve always wanted, the secretary that handles your company organization, or the mentor you’ve always needed. Every SoloDev knows how challenging, exhausting, and versatile the problems of game development projects can be. You end up merging a whole bunch of jobs into one person and have to be at least somewhat competent in a hundred different areas.

For all the weaknesses AI has in topics where we already have deep expertise, it becomes incredibly helpful in areas where we’re not so strong, where we need confirmation, or where we need to run analyses.

Personally, I rediscovered my passion for coding projects through ChatGPT – even outside of the gaming space. Why? Because I love the conversations about state-of-the-art technologies, infrastructure, or even creating marketing assets. As a freelance developer and indie game dev, I juggle a ton of areas, and as always, there are some that I honestly just hate dealing with.

Perfect example: market analysis for new projects or social media marketing. This is exactly where I find AI to be the strongest. You can use it to draft small roadmaps, generate ideas for projects, and later verify them. On these meta and organizational levels, ChatGPT has become a completely new tool for me – one that has actually motivated me to do more, because I can offload the “low-level” work or the stuff I simply don’t enjoy.

It’s a huge relief to have something at your side that can confirm your idea is solid, or that a market isn’t already saturated. These kinds of statements do something to you. They give you the push to put energy and joy back into your work. Over the last few years, I had a ton of ideas and concepts, but I lacked that someone to say: “Hey, this is a cool idea, keep working on it.” Instead, I started seeing everything as not worth it anymore – and along with that, I lost the fun in daily programming.

That has now completely changed. I also work a lot with ChatGPT while coding. If you bring enough knowledge to recognize when it’s talking nonsense (which happens often), you save yourself tons of time digging through documentation or searching for examples. You get solid code snippets and interesting approaches for your work.

But: this only works if you actually know what you’re doing. Just copying things over without understanding them won’t get you anywhere. Very often, ChatGPT’s answers are missing exactly that specific expertise or the context you really need. Generic code only helps if you know how to turn it into something useful.

What I want to say is this: For me as a SoloDev, it’s become one of the most insane tools out there for boosting productivity.

Downsides

• You often get solutions without having gone through the process yourself. That means you might miss important things along the way.
• Handing over project management completely can be frustrating, because it’s easy to lose track.

My final advice: AI is a tool – and it should be treated as such. If you don’t understand something, it’s on you to learn it.

In my next post, I’ll write more in detail about my new project.