I Made a Photoshop Game: My 5 Shocking Steps for 2025
Ever thought of making a game *inside* Photoshop? I did it. Discover my 5 shocking, future-forward steps for 2025 that blend AI, design, and code.
Liam Carter
Digital artist and game developer obsessed with pushing the boundaries of creative software.
What if I told you that your copy of Photoshop, the one you use for photo edits and graphic design, is a dormant game engine? It sounds crazy, I know. I thought so too, until I spent a month pushing it to its absolute limits. The result? A simple, but fully functional, point-and-click adventure game that runs entirely inside a Photoshop panel.
This wasn't just about creating game assets. This was about building game logic, state management, and interactivity directly within the software we all thought we knew. The process was a wild ride, and it completely changed how I view creative tools. Forget what you know about traditional workflows. For 2025, the rules are different. Here are the five "shocking" steps I took to turn Adobe Photoshop into a mini game engine.
Step 1: The “No-Code” Illusion: Scripting with AI
The first hurdle in making Photoshop do anything interactive is automation. For years, this meant wrestling with Photoshop's clunky Actions panel or diving deep into ExtendScript, a dialect of JavaScript that feels like it’s from another era. My shocking secret for 2025? I barely wrote any code myself.
Instead, I treated an AI assistant (like ChatGPT-4 or GitHub Copilot) as my dedicated Photoshop scripting intern. Here’s the workflow:
- Plain English Prompts: I wrote prompts like, “Write a Photoshop ExtendScript that finds a layer named ‘Player’, moves it 10 pixels to the right, and then makes a layer named ‘Door’ visible.”
- Iterative Refinement: The first script rarely worked perfectly. I’d paste the error message back into the AI chat and say, “I got this error. Can you fix the script?”
- Building a Library: Over time, I built a library of small, functional scripts for every action I needed: moving objects, changing layer visibility, switching layer comps, and even modifying text layers to update a score.
This isn’t “no-code”; it’s “low-code” on steroids. You’re the director, and the AI is your tireless programmer. This approach demolishes the technical barrier that has kept most designers from ever touching Photoshop’s powerful scripting engine. The ability to articulate your goal in plain language is now the primary skill.
Step 2: The Asset Factory: Generative Fill as a Core Mechanic
Game development is notorious for its insatiable need for assets. Backgrounds, characters, items, textures... the list is endless. Traditionally, you'd spend weeks painting or modeling them. My approach was radically different: I used Generative AI as an integral part of the game's world-building.
But I'm not just talking about using Midjourney or Generative Fill to create a static background. I’m talking about using it dynamically. The shocking part is treating Photoshop's AI tools not just as a creation device, but as a procedural generation engine.
Instead of creating one perfect key, I prompted Generative Fill to create “a rusty old key on a wooden table” five different times. The result? Five unique key variations for my game's puzzles, generated in under a minute.
For a puzzle in my game, the player had to combine two items. My script would select the area where the new item should appear and, using experimental APIs and command-line integrations with tools like Stable Diffusion, generate a new image based on a combined prompt. The player's actions could literally create new, never-before-seen assets right on the canvas. This transforms asset creation from a laborious task into an exciting, unpredictable part of the gameplay itself.
Step 3: The State Machine in Layers: Thinking Like a Developer
This is the biggest mental shift for any designer. We’re taught to see Photoshop as a stack of images. To build a game, you have to see it as a machine of states. The shocking truth is that Photoshop already has all the tools you need to manage game states; we just use them for other things.
I built my entire game's logic by re-contextualizing Photoshop's core features. This required a complete change in mindset, moving from a visual designer to a systems thinker.
The Mindset Shift: Designer vs. Developer
Here’s a comparison of how I used to think versus how I operate now within Photoshop:
| Traditional Photoshop Thinking | Game Dev Mindset in Photoshop |
|---|---|
| Layers are for stacking visuals. | Layers & Groups are game objects or characters. A layer group named “Player” contains all its visual states (idle, walking, etc.). |
| Layer Comps are for client mockups. | Layer Comps are game states or levels. I had comps for “Level 1 - Start,” “Level 1 - Door Open,” and “Level 2 - Cave Entrance.” |
| Smart Objects are for non-destructive edits. | Smart Objects are reusable “prefabs.” An enemy character was a Smart Object; I could place multiple instances, and updating the source updated them all. |
| Actions are for repetitive tasks. | Scripts (UXP/ExtendScript) are the game's logic engine. They are what transition the game from one Layer Comp (state) to another. |
By organizing my .PSD file this way, the entire game became a structured, manageable system. Clicking a button in my game's UI would run a script that simply said, “Switch to the ‘Level 1 - Door Open’ Layer Comp.” The entire visual state of the game would change instantly. It’s elegant, powerful, and hiding in plain sight.
Step 4: The UI is the Game: Building Logic with UXP
So how did I create the actual buttons and interface for the game? Not with weird, invisible layers or hacky slices. The entire game is controlled by a custom Photoshop panel I built using UXP (Unified Extensibility Platform).
UXP is Adobe's modern framework for building panels using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. This was the absolute game-changer. My “game” is actually a web app running inside a Photoshop panel.
How It Works
- The Interface: I designed the UI with standard HTML and CSS. This included buttons for “Walk Left,” “Walk Right,” “Use Item,” and an inventory display.
- The Brain: The core logic lives in a JavaScript file. When you click the “Walk Left” button in the panel, the JavaScript doesn't move an HTML element. Instead, it executes one of the AI-generated scripts from Step 1.
- The Bridge: UXP acts as the bridge. The panel's JavaScript tells Photoshop's main application, “Hey, run the script named ‘movePlayerLeft.jsx’.” Photoshop executes the script, the player layer on the canvas moves, and the game updates.
This is the most powerful and “shocking” step of all. You are not faking a game in Photoshop; you are using web technologies to command Photoshop as your render engine. The panel holds the state (e.g., `let playerHasKey = false;`), and the Photoshop canvas just visualizes it. This separation of logic and presentation is a fundamental concept in both web and game development, and it's now fully possible inside Photoshop.
Step 5: The “Headless” Export: Automating the Final Build
After all this work, what’s the final product? A giant .PSD file that only works if you have my special UXP panel? That’s cool, but not very shareable.
The final shocking step was to create an automated “build” process. I wrote a master script that effectively “plays” the game by itself. It would:
- Start at the first Layer Comp (“Main Menu”).
- Programmatically trigger every possible game state by cycling through all Layer Comps.
- For each state, export a high-resolution PNG of the canvas to a designated `build` folder.
This script runs “headlessly,” meaning it does everything in the background without requiring any user input. In minutes, I had a folder filled with every single screen and state of my game. From there, I could easily stitch them together into an interactive web prototype, an animated video, or even import them into a real game engine like Unity or Godot as pre-rendered backgrounds.
This step makes the entire experiment practical. It proves that this isn't just a novelty; it’s a legitimate, hyper-efficient workflow for prototyping 2D games and interactive narratives.
Conclusion: Your Tools Are More Than You Think
Making a game inside Photoshop felt like a magic trick. But it's not magic; it’s a new way of thinking. It’s about seeing a tool not for what it is, but for what it could be. The convergence of AI assistants, powerful scripting APIs like UXP, and a developer mindset is transforming our creative software into limitless platforms for innovation.
Is Photoshop the best game engine for your next big RPG? Of course not. But for prototyping, interactive storytelling, or just shattering your own creative boundaries, it’s an untapped playground. The line between designer and developer is officially blurred. My advice for 2025 is simple: stop asking what your software can do, and start telling it what you want it to do.
Now, what crazy project will you build?