Best AI for Making Games Free: What Runs Out First
The best free AI for making games is usually a chat tool that shows your game right on the page, such as Gemini Canvas or Claude artifacts, because you can start with nothing installed. Every free plan stops somewhere, so the real skill is knowing what runs out first and keeping your game easy to move.
All limits below are from the tools' own pages on 2 November 2026.
What stops you on each free plan
| Tool | What you get for free | What catches you out |
|---|---|---|
| Gemini Canvas | Open to all Gemini users, sign-in required | Anyone with a public link can view and edit the app's data |
| Claude artifacts | Included in the Free plan once "Create and edit files" is on | Shared storage, as for a leaderboard, starts at Pro |
| Bolt | 300K tokens a day, 1M a month | Larger projects use more per message |
| Lovable | 5 build credits a day, up to 30 a month | Daily credits do not roll over |
| Replit Starter | Daily Agent credits, one published app | The public link goes down after 30 days |
| Google Antigravity | A $0 plan with "basic weekly rate limits" | You install it, and the pricing page gives no numbers |
The table hides the biggest question: what happens to your game on the day the allowance ends? If you cannot get it out, you wait or you pay.
Stay movable: the one-file habit
Keep the whole game in a single HTML file for as long as you can, and save a copy on your computer at the end of each session. A file you own can be pasted into any tool tomorrow. That turns three small free plans into one longer one.
Here is what that looks like over two weeks with Moth Lantern, an invented game where a moth flies from lamp to lamp before its own glow fades.
- Days 1 and 2. In Canvas: the moth follows the mouse, and one lamp recharges it. Save
moth-day2.html. - Days 3 to 5. Add the fading glow and three short levels. Save a numbered copy every evening.
- Day 6. You hit a limit. Write the hand-over note below and carry on in a different tool.
- Days 7 to 10. Add sound and two harder levels.
- Days 11 to 14. Watch five friends play and change only what made them stumble.
Files are a poor fit for some games. Anything with accounts or shared scores needs a server, which pushes you towards a builder and its limits. Decide that before day one. When the free route is too tight, the full comparison shows what else there is.
Paste this to your AI
I am about to run out of free usage, and tomorrow I will continue this game in a different AI tool. Write a hand-over note that a stranger could work from.
Begin with a Mermaid diagram of how the game moves from one situation to the next, such as title, flying, glow gone and level won. Draw it from the code, then follow each arrow back to the code and fix the diagram wherever the two differ. The next tool will build from this diagram.
Then add what the game is, every rule with its exact number, what works today, what is broken, and the next three jobs.
Take each rule and number from the current code and name the place you found it. If something exists only in our chat and not in the code, mark it "chat only". If nobody has run a feature yet, write "never run" next to it, not "works". Where you are unsure, write "unknown" and leave it at that.
Then give me the whole game as one file I can save.
Or skip this and connect the MCP: your AI then finds all of this by itself.Connect the MCP
Mermaid is a drawing written as plain text, so it moves between tools as easily as your game file. Paste it into mermaid.live to see the picture.
How to check it worked
- Open the saved file on your computer. Double-click it. If the game needs anything from the old tool, you will find out now.
- Start a fresh chat in another tool. Paste the note and the file, then ask how a player loses. The answer should match both the diagram and the game.
- Compare three numbers. Pick three from the note and look for them in the game. The lamp recharge time is a good one.
- Look for "never run". If a large game has none of those marks, the note is too confident.