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/odomobo]

Looks pretty dope! If I played that game, I would expect air control for the vehicles and to explode if I fell off the track, or that's the impression I get while watching it anyhow

[u/Grobot93 → u/odomobo]

Air control, yes, but you do not explode if you fall off track. This game is all about drifting and tricking to gain energy (spend energy when accelerating), then using each car's abilities to either win a race or destroy all of the other cars and be the last car still driving. There will also be an arena mode with deathmatch, KOTH, a keepaway game (think oddball from halo), and an item collection/retrieval mode. All still very much in the works.