How Do You Make a Video Game on Google Slides, Step by Step

If you want to learn how to make a video game on Google Slides, the whole trick is one feature: any shape, image or piece of text on a slide can link to another slide in the same deck. Chain enough of those links together and a presentation stops being a lecture and becomes a game where the player chooses what happens next. Teachers use it for quiz shows, kids use it for adventure stories, and game-jam hobbyists use it as a zero-install way to prototype branching ideas. This guide covers the core technique, the game types that work, a worked example, how to share or record your game, and what to do once you outgrow Slides.

Can you really make a video game in Google Slides?

Yes, within limits. A Google Slides game is a nonlinear presentation: instead of moving from slide 1 to slide 2 to slide 3, the player clicks a button and jumps to whichever slide that button links to. That is enough to build anything driven by choices and screens, such as story games, trivia, board games and point-and-click puzzles.

What Slides cannot do is remember things or move things on its own. There are no variables (stored values like a score or health), no timers you can react to, no keyboard controls beyond flipping slides, and no physics. Real video game development combines programming, art, design and sound; Slides gives you the art and design parts, and fakes the programming with links. Knowing that boundary up front saves you from planning a platformer that the tool can never run.

The upside is real, though. Everyone with a Google account already has Slides, it works in a browser and on Chromebooks, and you can share a playable game with a single link. For a first project, that is hard to beat.

How to make a video game on Google Slides: the core technique

Every slide game, from a five-question quiz to a 60-slide adventure, uses the same five steps. Here is how to make a video game on Google Slides from a blank deck.

1. Map the game before you open Slides

Draw boxes on paper, one per screen, with arrows for each choice. A box is a slide; an arrow is a link. Number the boxes. This map is your design document, and it stops you from creating dead ends where a slide has no way out.

2. Build one slide per screen

Start with a blank deck and use the Title Only or Blank layout so placeholder text does not get in the way. Create your title slide, an instructions slide, then every screen from your map. Rename nothing yet; just keep the slide order matching your numbers so linking is easy.

3. Add buttons and link them

Draw a shape for each choice (rounded rectangles read clearly as buttons), type the choice on it, then select the shape and use Insert, then Link (or Ctrl+K on Windows, Cmd+K on Mac). Choose the option to link to a slide in this presentation and pick the target slide. Linking the whole shape, rather than just the text, gives players a bigger area to click.

4. Stop accidental slide advances

In Present mode, clicking anywhere that is not a link, or pressing an arrow key, moves to the next slide in order. This is the most common way slide games break. Two fixes help: make buttons large, and put a “buffer” slide after each choice slide that says “Pick a button!” with a single link back. A stray click then lands somewhere harmless.

5. Test every path in Present mode

Links do not jump while you are editing. Press Present (or Slideshow) and play every route from your map, ticking off arrows as you go. Fix any link that lands on the wrong slide, then test again.

Five game types that work well in Slides

Once you know how to make a video game on Google Slides, the question becomes what kind. These formats fit the tool’s strengths.

• Choose-your-own-adventure: each slide is a scene with two or three choices. Easy to start, easy to expand, and the best fit for the link system.
• Quiz show: a board of category tiles linking to question slides, with answer buttons that link to “Correct” or “Try again” slides. Players keep score on paper.
• Board game: one slide holds the board; a dice slide shows a number, and players move tokens by dragging shapes in edit mode, or track spaces on paper in Present mode.
• Hidden picture: place small transparent shapes over objects in an illustration and link each to a “Found it!” slide. Missing clicks advance to a buffer slide that sends players back.
• Escape room: rooms are slides, clues are linked objects, and a code is entered by clicking digit buttons in sequence, where only the right sequence of slides leads to the exit.

Templates for these exist all over the web, but building your own is where you learn. If you want art beyond clip art, generate scene illustrations with AI Image Gen and paste them in as slide backgrounds.

A worked example: a 10-slide dungeon escape

Here is a small complete game you can build in an afternoon. It shows how to make a video game on Google Slides that feels like a game rather than a quiz, and it introduces a trick for faking memory.

Slide	Screen	Buttons and links
1	Title: “Dungeon Escape”	Play → 2
2	Buffer: “Pick a button!”	Back → 3
3	Dark cell, torch on wall	Grab torch → 4, Shout for help → 9
4	Cell, lit, loose stone visible	Pull stone → 5
5	Tunnel fork	Left → 6, Right → 7
6	Flooded passage	Swim → 9, Go back → 5
7	Locked gate, key on hook	Take key → 8
8	Moonlit exit: “You escaped!”	Play again → 1
9	“The guard caught you.”	Try again → 3
10	Credits	Title → 1

The faked memory lives in slides 3 and 4. Slide 4 is a copy of the cell slide with the torch removed and the room brightened, so the game “remembers” you took the torch by showing a different version of the room. That is the core hack of every bigger slide game: duplicate a slide for each state. It works, but it multiplies fast. Two items give you four versions of a room; five items give you 32. That is the point where most slide projects stall.

Mistakes that break slide games

• Linking only the text on a button, so clicks on the edge of the shape fall through and advance the slide.
• Forgetting a way back from a “wrong answer” slide, which strands the player.
• Sharing an editable link, which lets players see every slide in the sidebar and spoil the game.
• Testing in edit mode, where links behave differently than in Present mode.
• Using huge background images, which make the deck slow to load on school Chromebooks.

How to share your game, or turn it into a video

Sharing a playable version

To share the game itself, set sharing to “Anyone with the link” as a viewer, so players cannot edit it. For a cleaner experience, use the Publish to the web option under the File menu, which gives a link that opens the deck as a presentation rather than in the editor. Tell players to click the buttons rather than the arrows. If you want a separate copy per player, share a link that prompts them to make a copy.

Turning the game into a video

Making a video of a game made in Slides means picking one path, because a video cannot be clicked. Check the Download options under the File menu, since Google updates them; if no video format is listed, two routes work reliably: record your screen while you play through in Present mode, or download the deck as a PowerPoint file and use PowerPoint’s export to video. Upload the result anywhere, including YouTube, which Google owns.

If a video you inserted into Slides will not play, check its sharing first. Slides pulls video from YouTube or Google Drive, and a Drive file only plays for people who can access it.

Making a trailer with AI Video Gen

A screen recording shows how the game plays; a trailer makes people want to play it. AI Video Gen puts several top video models in one panel, including Grok Imagine Video, Wan 2.7, Seedance 2.0 and Kling 3.0. Its image-to-video mode is the useful one here: feed it the scene art from your slides, such as the dark cell or the moonlit exit, describe the motion you want, and you get a short animated clip of that scene. End-frame control lets you set where a clip finishes, so you can link the cell shot to the tunnel shot, and native audio adds sound to the clip. Cut three or four of these together with your screen recording and you have a proper video for your game. The AI Video Gen overview shows what each model is suited to.

Where Google Slides runs out

The duplicate-a-slide trick hits a wall the moment you want a score that counts up, a health bar, a timer, or a character that walks around. Those need a game engine, software that handles rendering, input and game logic so the game can react moment to moment.

Feature	Google Slides	A real game engine
Branching choices	Yes, via slide links	Yes
Score, health, inventory	Faked with duplicate slides	Variables, any amount
Timers and countdowns	No reliable way	Yes
Keyboard or controller movement	No	Yes
Animation and physics	Slide transitions only	Yes
Accidental skipping	Common	You control all input
Setup needed	None	Varies by engine

That is not a reason to skip Slides. Knowing how to make a video game on Google Slides teaches the fundamentals that every engine relies on: screens, states, transitions and player choice. Your slide map is already a plan for a coded game.

Rebuilding your slide game in WizardGenie

The natural next step is to keep your design and swap the engine. WizardGenie is the AI game engine inside Sorceress: you describe the game you want, and it writes the code, runs it and iterates on it in real time. That style of working, steering with plain-language requests instead of writing every line, is often called vibe coding, and it suits someone coming from Slides because you already think in screens and choices.

WizardGenie runs on the web with nothing to install, and as a Windows desktop app with an auto-updater that adds native file access and longer agent sessions. It drives the leading AI coding models, and you can switch between them with your own API key. More detail is on the WizardGenie overview.

A prompt that ports the dungeon escape

Paste your slide map in as text and ask for the things Slides could not do. For example: “Make a browser text adventure from this map. Add a move counter, a torch item the player must pick up before pulling the stone, and a 60-second countdown that sends you to the caught screen.” Then play it, and ask for changes the way you would ask a teammate.

What that looks like in code

Under the hood, a slide game is just data: screens, text and links. This short, complete HTML file is the dungeon escape with one thing Slides cannot do, a move counter. Save it as index.html and open it in any browser.

<!DOCTYPE html>
<html>
<body>
  <p id="moves"></p>
  <h2 id="text"></h2>
  <div id="choices"></div>
  <script>
    const scenes = {
      cell:   { text: "You wake in a dark cell. A torch flickers.",
                choices: [["Grab the torch", "stone"], ["Shout for help", "caught"]] },
      stone:  { text: "The torch shows a loose stone.",
                choices: [["Pull the stone", "fork"]] },
      fork:   { text: "The tunnel splits.",
                choices: [["Go left", "caught"], ["Go right", "exit"]] },
      caught: { text: "The guard caught you.",
                choices: [["Try again", "cell"]] },
      exit:   { text: "Moonlight! You escaped.",
                choices: [["Play again", "cell"]] }
    };
    let moves = 0;

    function show(id) {
      const scene = scenes[id];
      if (id === "cell") moves = 0;
      document.getElementById("moves").textContent = "Moves: " + moves;
      document.getElementById("text").textContent = scene.text;
      const box = document.getElementById("choices");
      box.innerHTML = "";
      for (const [label, target] of scene.choices) {
        const btn = document.createElement("button");
        btn.textContent = label;
        btn.onclick = () => { moves++; show(target); };
        box.appendChild(btn);
      }
    }
    show("cell");
  </script>
</body>
</html>

Notice that the scenes object is your slide table in another form, and the moves variable replaces dozens of duplicated slides. You do not have to write this yourself in WizardGenie, but reading it shows why the jump from Slides to code is smaller than it looks. When you want real characters on screen, Auto-Sprite v2 generates animated 2D sprites, and the Sorceress tools guide maps out the art, audio and 3D tools you can add later.

The workflow at a glance

Here is the full path, from first slide to a game and a video you can show people:

1. Sketch a slide map on paper: boxes for screens, arrows for choices.
2. Build one slide per screen, using Title Only or Blank layouts.
3. Turn shapes into buttons with Insert, then Link, pointing at slides in the deck.
4. Add buffer slides so stray clicks never skip the game.
5. Test every path in Present mode, then share a view-only or published link.
6. Record a playthrough, and make trailer clips from your slide art in AI Video Gen.
7. When you need scores, timers or movement, rebuild the design in WizardGenie.

Learning how to make a video game on Google Slides is a genuinely useful first project: it forces you to think about structure and player choice before anything else. Build the small version, watch someone play it, and when the duplicate slides start piling up, take the same map into a real engine. Curious what the bigger version costs? This breakdown of video game costs walks through the numbers.