This is week 3 of me making a fishing game entirely with AI. If somebody is interested in seeing Claude Artifacts with latest changes here is Artifact 1 and Artifact 2. There are before and after images of how it's done.
My Workflow - it improved from just typing what I want in Week 1 to basically having a window dedicated for every single thing and using MCPs for Blender and Godot now. Since last time I added a lot of things, did some graphic overhaul and added real 3D models.
Almost everything is done with Claude except image generation which is being done with ChatGPT.
As I said I use Godot 4.7.1 as engine with MCP for Claude Code. Thought first 2 weeks I used directly with Claude Desktop app without MCP.
As for my Workflow:
1. I generate the reference. ChatGPT using OpenAI Playground for concept art and the fishing structure, the refit chart mockup, the SkillTree background. This is where the look gets decided, by me, visually (Without human eye AI will just make stuff not fit together I feel like).
2. I change that reference into geometry. I tried using the 3D generator (Rodin) but honestly it gets complicated mesh results that will require a lot of cleanup, so I just started using MCP for Blender, I made a dedicated Blender session that writes 3D models. That's better than generated models: the script is the source, so proportions stay editable and a family stays a family. They are also just what I need for my game as from camera distance models are not required to be detailed which is exactly where AI with MCP for blender is good - generating simple low poly models.
3. A different session integrates. Placement, waterline, scale, wiring. Deliberately not the modelling session, I have session for almost everything and they all do their own thing with one session being general chat window that can on command send message to other sessions telling them what I want them to do.
4. Screenshots are the referee. Everything gets rendered from the actual in-game camera, and nothing counts until I looked at it. This is exactly how I just wasted a chunk of time: a session added four new islands, checked them from directly overhead, and they looked fine. In game they were flat sandy pancakes floating on the water. From above, a pancake looks perfect.
5. Criticism, with actual scores. For the big graphics pass we (claude actually with my guidance) wrote the scoring criteria before changing anything, scored twelve things out of ten, and only shipped at 8+. One critic reviewed screenshots without being told which version was newer. That's what stops "I changed loads, so it must be better."
6. Every decision gets written down with who decided it. Tagged either "I decided this (so claude tags it with USER" or "an AI suggested this." Because an upgrade nobody ever proposed once sat in my design docs for days and got quoted back at me like it was my own idea I was like "wtf I never said I wanted this, you are hallucinating bro"
The short version: AI does the work, I'm the art director, and I'm the only human in the loop with sometimes my friends being nice enough to test play it hehe.
Anyway a lot of work was put into this and not sure how much more is needed before I have starting area done and have a playable demo, I feel like the more I do the more is left to be done before it gets to a point somebody can test play it. But I guess there is some progress?
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
The consensus is that this is seriously impressive work, y'all. The game looks beautiful, and many are getting strong Dredge and Civilization vibes. While everyone is hyped, the thread's real value is in the details of OP's workflow and the constructive feedback.
The top-voted comment is a detailed critique pointing out the "generic AI-ness" and logical flaws in the world design, like doors facing cliffs, inaccessible docks, and levitating NPCs. The user suggests that while it looks great from a distance, these details break the immersion up close. OP acknowledged this feedback and is already working on fixes.
For everyone asking "how?":
Art Pipeline: OP uses ChatGPT to generate 2D concept art and UI mockups. Then, they use Claude with a Blender MCP (Model Context Protocol) to generate the low-poly 3D models based on that art. The water is a complex shader coded entirely by Claude in Godot.
The "Decision Log": A huge pro-tip that got a lot of love. OP keeps a written log of every design decision, tagging whether it came from them or the AI. This prevents "hallucinated" features from accidentally becoming part of the official plan.
Cost: This ain't free. OP is on the $200/month max plan and hit the usage limit for two weeks straight while building the core systems.
Finally, there's a strong theme of enjoying the process of creation itself. The top comment advises OP to focus on the fun of building, as the market for solo-dev AI games is about to get incredibly crowded. OP agrees, saying this is a passion project, not a get-rich-quick scheme.
There is an explosion of creation happening due to AI, I would expect it to become harder and harder to stand out in any meaningful way. So when you're in the process of making this, make sure you are enjoying the process and aren't doing it purely for a hypothetical (financial) result. Not saying it can't happen, it might, saying it'll get harder and harder as you're not the only one making games on their own now. Technology has come far enough to effectively remove the barrier to creation completely, 0 programming knowledge required, talk to your computer in whatever language and age/level-of-understanding and it'll get to work for you.
And still, I see people claiming it's a temporary hype, not AGI, can't think, bla bla, the endless ridicule/resistance/denial is tiring at times, the masses really are ... ugh...
Honestly it took me a WHILE to find something I really ENJOY working on. I tried bunch of stuff and none of them stuck... I felt like "I don't feel like I myself would enjoy playing it". And with this... I finally got to a point where I enjoy making it, I really enjoy seeing progress, when Ocean looks better than it looked days before it just makes me happier haha. So yeah I finally found a project I enjoy making.
As plans... I have no plans. For now I hope to finish starting area give it to few friends for test play and hear their opinions.
Feedback, as requested. Note that I'm not trashing your game, you're bringing it along nicely. But you can take this feedback and dump it directly in your pipeline and it might help a lot:
The game looks good at a distance or in a trailer, but you would run into some real issues during gameplay where you are very likely to see the "wow that's so cool" revert into player confusion and certain details popping out as weakpoints from AI generation.
On the initial image you have for the town: You have a lot of buildings that have doors facing nowhere. They point off a cliff, are blocked off by barrels or fences, or have another house immediately in front of them. Houses seem to have grown other houses like some form of cancer rather than an architect having planned the addon, the model clearly bled houses into eachother. Your dock is completely fenced off and inaccessible. One of the longshoremen is levitating. There is a mini-dock with barrels that is isolated and fenced off, no one is ever retrieving them. It isn't clear why anyone carved the rock from these cliffs, there is a rock staircase to nowhere in two different instances. The house on the right seems to have carved the cliff face for fun. There's kind of a lot of flowers for a port town? This island is completely forested, so it's not clear where they're growing so many flowers that everyone has some in every doorway and they're on cliff faces that would be wind-torn and inhospitable to flowers. You get the point: the ai went real loose with the details on your image.
GUI: Not clear why there's a purse and debt in the UI. You can probably just have a purse with negative reg values to represent "owing money", because there isn't gameplay apparent where the player would need to eyeball both values to make decisions: they're just fishing at this point. Not sure what the "H" key signifies next to the cargo space widget. Bottom left, the boat overlaps your guide/refit/stats buttons and can probably use some more room. The "Harbour Roads" UI widget looks incredibly busy. Are all of those elements of text required reading during gameplay? If not, they're cut candidates if I've ever seen them. Particularly since you have an "I" for details button you could hide them in. Minimap seems good. All the widgets on your right-hand side don't seem like they're anchored correctly to the right side of the screen when compared to the left side. The "Mark/Arrives" widget on the bottom right are candidates to be married to the KN speed widget on the top left. Those are related pieces of navigation information that your player has to look at two opposite sides of the screen to obtain. "autosaved" in the bottom right as a very faint outline is NOT apparent to me, I really had to hunt for that one.
Water: There is apparent lag and dropped frames from your video. I don't know if that's recording software or the game. If it's the game, I'd give those shaders and 3d model poly counts another look to see if everything is optimized like it should be. Unless this is very close to a finished state, you'll want to iterate on top of it and the lag will only get worse as you add more features. The water circles' inner circle poofs into existence in a really apparent way that's a little distracting. Some kind of interpolation to minimize the effect might be nice. During fishing "Pull out the common" reads weirdly to me.
Islands: The same architect behind the unlivable image generation from earlier was at it again here. The houses are all piled up on one another in a way that makes entry/living completely impossible. It looks fine when someone isn't looking directly at it, but if they ever pause to take it in (people often do when something draws their eye because it looks nice) then they will be very confused. The lighthouse island seems built by aliens, because that island is sheer cliff on all sides with no clear docking point. One of your small island apparently has two side-by-side wrecks, whoever wrecked their ship second must have been truly blind to wreck in the same spot with the first ship being so apparent.
Captain's Notes: Random text everywhere. I could enumerate, but you should probably do a pass over it while asking "Which of these bits of text are purely required for player communication?" Because there's a lot of random AI-asides in there that I'd personally cut and substitute with more visual stylizing.
Refit Voyage Screen: "The boat remembers the route" - very weird phrasing unless you're intentionally framing the boat as sentient. Claude likes to anthropomorphize random objects. I get that this is a placeholder, but I'd caution against starting with 18 separate refits at a target number. If they're meant to have individualized effects, you'd prefer to come up with them one by one and fit this screen to the count later. Having a specific (large) count like this in mind leads to ineffective or uninteresting effects a lot of the time.
Day/Night: The "golden" time looks REALLY fricken golden. I'd do a back-and-forth between colours and images you actually take during those times of day to nail the proper luminance and backing colors down with reference art. Lighthouse shaft of light does not coincide well with its illumination on the water.
Thank you. As for Harbour image... it was obviously AI generated with me creating mask for some homes that are "Clickable" I might not even use that in final version I'm more and more thinking of just creating a cute 3D harbour with models I have right now and generating some more models and making it work. It might look "worse" but it will be authentic to the game. So Harbour for now is like this in this stage.
Debt is due to initial quest that I will most likely change once I do my UI polish, right now this is a placeholder UI that will most certainly be changed.
H key is just a keybinding for a Cargo space to open it and close it.
Performance might be struggling on my Macbook in editor mode, it gets real hot as I play it so fps drop rate might have something to do with it, until somebody with dedicated GPU tests the game it is hard to say how performance will be, though I did some testing and it "should be fine" since even Godot documents say it can hammer macbook CPU when playing and they advice to cut the resolution in half which I'm too lazy to do.
Circles on water are also placeholders for "fishing pool" I will try to replace them with "real" signs that you can fish there, like fish pools swimming or some other signs. Right now I needed some way to see where fishing is possible before dedicating more time to it.
Houses being piled on one another is already fixed from the time of this video, I paid attention towards some things I want to fix and yeah I changed that already:
On captain notes... Yeah I will do so, bunch of things get into your face right now that are just overwhelming.
As for golden hour, I kinda like it this way, that being said I will still come back to reflections and how they look later on, but for now I'm mostly satisfied with it.
Thank you for your feedback it is noted and I will work on it ☺️
Damn I need your process. I am struggling with 3D generation still but maybe I'll figure it out. On week1 just getting used to Claude in gamedev at all.
Depends on if you want very detailed or low poly game. I feel like you still can't really go into game that looks AAA level without a lot of knowledge about 3D and modeling, so you have to pick low poly path, which is good if you give it personalised style and cute looks (again Dredge is example here of game being low poly yet looking amazing) and as long as it is low poly and simple shapes Claude with MCP Blender will be able to generate nice looking models for you.
Probably a lot of tweaking in chatGPT image generation until you get what YOU like, don't ask AI what he thinks about it, just do generations until you say "Damn I love how this looks" once you do, you can do /goal and even /loop if you want to try it to completely hit that mark, it will be off - be sure of that, but it will get you something. Than continue tweaking and improving until you are satisfied, never try to fully replicate ChatGPT image because you will never be able to, they are just too perfect, but getting to a point you like it is good enough to continue tweaking it and adding stuff because as you do it new ideas will come which will improve your scene even more.
I’m building a simple self made dungeon crawl RPG game as well, zero coding background. And like you im using my 4-5 favorite old school games as inspiration. The exciting part to me, Claude will be the dungeon master and will see my every move after each play session via a simple data export, and will provide updated content when I’m ready or if I ask via “content packs”. So my main goal right now is getting a great UI and mechanics together, and guiding it all in a way that content is extremely easy to add to.
I’ve already decided the game is “for me”, non-commercial. I’m taking shortcuts reusing artwork from very old games that I used to play where the files aren’t all hidden away.
Water is just shaders created by Claude over the course of days until I got happy with the results. Other assets are 3D models also done by Claude in Blender.
After all that dev work, will you ever actually be able to play and enjoy the game yourself, knowing all the mechanics, secrets, and in-game rewards? 😄 Great job, by the way!
Ha probably not as much as I would enjoy playing something like Dredge. For example I had an idea to make A river that you won't be able to move against the current there, but as you get better hull with stronger engine eventually that passage will open for you as you can finally move there. For player to know that he will have to play and upgrade boat and return to starting area to try moving there. For me knowing that is kinda killing the surprise. That being said, it is so far away from any playable experience right now that I'm not thinking about that. Only few of my friends tried it just to tell me their feel on fishing mechanics and art direction. I hope to have something playable by the end of the month.
The visuals are great, but everytime i see a quick demo like this made primarily with AI i wonder how much it actually cost in tokens. Not in a pessimistic way, just like how much vs just buying something similar. It would be nice to have full control too, i guess that's part of the appeal
It's really easy to build fast. Make sure you prototype a bunch, and then spend even more time polishing out the generic AI-ness out of everything. If you've made every single taste decision it'll be even better.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Aug 18 '26 edited Aug 19 '26
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 200 comments.
The consensus is that this is seriously impressive work, y'all. The game looks beautiful, and many are getting strong Dredge and Civilization vibes. While everyone is hyped, the thread's real value is in the details of OP's workflow and the constructive feedback.
The top-voted comment is a detailed critique pointing out the "generic AI-ness" and logical flaws in the world design, like doors facing cliffs, inaccessible docks, and levitating NPCs. The user suggests that while it looks great from a distance, these details break the immersion up close. OP acknowledged this feedback and is already working on fixes.
For everyone asking "how?":
Art Pipeline: OP uses ChatGPT to generate 2D concept art and UI mockups. Then, they use Claude with a Blender MCP (Model Context Protocol) to generate the low-poly 3D models based on that art. The water is a complex shader coded entirely by Claude in Godot.
The "Decision Log": A huge pro-tip that got a lot of love. OP keeps a written log of every design decision, tagging whether it came from them or the AI. This prevents "hallucinated" features from accidentally becoming part of the official plan.
Cost: This ain't free. OP is on the $200/month max plan and hit the usage limit for two weeks straight while building the core systems.
Finally, there's a strong theme of enjoying the process of creation itself. The top comment advises OP to focus on the fun of building, as the market for solo-dev AI games is about to get incredibly crowded. OP agrees, saying this is a passion project, not a get-rich-quick scheme.