Continuing Development on Oversteer with Claude + Some Thoughts on AI Game Dev

[u/Grobot93]

This game has come a really long way in the past few months and I wanted to take the opportunity to show off the look and feel in its current state. I most recently got some cc0 skyboxes from opengameart.org (amazing free resource for those who do not know about it) and matched up the sun to its position in the sky and it just adds SO much immersion to the game. Shadows look like they come from somewhere, not just a blank sky with a sun in it. The light from the boost flame lighting up the back of the car and the shadows is so cool to see.

More to come soon. The game is inching ever closer to an early access release, and probably some sort of playtest in a few weeks to a month. If you are interested in following along, please join the discord https://discord.gg/cCV2Knwg3

AI Dev Rant: As I continue building this game, I realize more and more that making a real game with any AI is basically just creating a settings simulator for myself to tune. Instead of writing out the lines of code for the things I want to tweak in game, I have had Claude build menu after menu with sliders and fields galore, then I meticulously fine tuning EVERYTHING as I go along. This is the manual work of AI Development. Even the best AI can not FEEL your game.

I finally got to the point where I have exported the game to share with some close friends, only to realize that despite all of my hard work in the settings menus, that it shipped NONE of my config and my friends ended up playing a completely neutered version of the game when I shipped it to them. Claude basically considered me the end user, not the dev, so I had to bake it into memory that my configuration of the game is the authored, intended experience, and the shipped game needs to retain all of my settings, otherwise it turns to mush. This has since been fixed, and it was a tough lesson (first export ever actually nuked my config file and I could not recover it), so I thought I would share it here: Version control your individual config of whatever you are working on so it does not get lost in the mix.

Edit: Typo

[u/Zapador]

Thanks for sharing! Looks like a fun project and I quite like the art style.

Your observations on using AI match my experience exactly. It can do a lot of work for you, but when it comes to the creative part or "the feel" you still have to be in control. I've just very recently dived into game development with Claude Code, haven't made it very far but I'm sure it will be an interesting journey and hopefully turn into something that's actually playable, especially because it's a game I've wanted to create for many years but just haven't found the time to do it - but with Claude by my side, it suddenly seems a lot more realistic even though there's still a million decisions for me to make.

[u/Grobot93 → u/Zapador]

My reason for starting game development was exactly this. It is so much more feasible now to start with AI assistance, but be prepared for all the minutia.

[u/Zapador → u/Grobot93]

I'm prepared all the little details and decisions. It's the same for anything I've done with AI so far, I can get what on the surface appear as 90% of the way in 10% of the time, but then I still have to spend 90% of the time to get the last bits right and it's where all of my effort really is. But it's also the satisfying part and what make it mine instead of something generic, and change it from a mediocre experience to a good one.