The Indie Game Challenge: win a £200 prize pool

Not long ago, making a game meant years spent learning to code. That is no longer true. With the right tools, and the right prompts, anyone can build something playable in an afternoon. We think that changes who gets to call themselves a game developer, and we want to find the best of them.

Games are not just for coders anymore

For a long time, a great game idea was not enough on its own. You needed the engineering to back it up, and that shut a lot of talented people out before they ever started. AI has changed that. It does the heavy lifting on the code, so the things that actually matter, the idea, the taste, the ambition, are what carry a project now.

That levels the field. Someone with a strange, brilliant concept and no formal training can build it and put it in front of people. The barrier is gone. What is left is imagination, and the willingness to try.

We are giving the next generation a stage

The Indie Game Challenge is our way of finding and backing the best young game developers, and giving their work somewhere to be seen. You build a game, upload it to the challenge on Vaultt, and people get to play it and cheer it on. Our judges, Yanis and Liam, look at every entry and pick their favourites. Winners get featured on Vaultt and share a £200 prize pool.

• 1st£100First prize
• 2nd£60Second prize
• 3rd£40Third prize

It is free to enter, it is open to everyone, and it runs until 8 October. Any kind of game counts, big or small, 2D or 3D, polished or rough. It just has to be yours.

Never built a game? We will show you how

You should not have to already know how to do this to take part. So our CTO is running a free workshop on how to build a game in five prompts. He will show you what to ask for, in what order, and how to end up with something that actually runs. No experience needed, and no code.

It is live on Wednesday 23 September, it is free, and it is open to everyone. Cannot make it? Register anyway and we will send you the recording.