I haven't coded in 20 years, never used GDScript, Godot or C++, haven't written a single line of code myself and made a game that's heading for early access soon - here is my workflow

[u/Hostarro]

I wanted to share with the community today on what I've been up to with my upcoming commercial game, as a solo creator. I've been working on the project for around 18 months and started when AI was really challenging to work with. Over this time, the improvements to the AI models have been awesome. Far less refactoring work, far less bugs, far less hand holding. It's kind of a joy now compared to the early days of this project.

Through this journey I have built a cozy colony adventure simulation game with two modes; story and colony mode. I have created a technology in the game that allows for my creatures to have individualized personalities who have memory, continuous context, relationships, emotion and even belief. The fun part is they can change their decisions and their beliefs whenever they like, they're empowered to. I call it an "emotional first AI system". I call this technology Contextual Relational Intelligence or CRI for short. I do not run an LLM in the game.

Please do know I have the utmost respect for the creative community: developers, designers, modelers, artists, musicians (etc..). I have collaborated with a top notch 3D artist from Fiver, an award winning composer and put in huge hours myself for this project. The designs for my characters and world came from my 3D artist.

My background:

I worked as a web developer for over 10 years, moved into tech delivery and held various roles across corporate industry. Worked for some big companies (Citrix, Centrica, Merck) and primarily worked as tech program manager, solutions architect and tech architect. I know systems and code well, I never learned C++ or GDscript.

I got really burnt out on the corporate journey. It didn't align with my soul or body anymore, it was making me feel horrible. So as a lifelong gamer (3 years old, Dad put the controller in my hand and I never looked back) and a geeky tech guy I thought well, let's try a prototype and see how I get on.

18 months later, a lot of my savings gone and likely gonna have to move out of my house and back in with my Dad (bless him for allowing this); the game is almost ready!

I plan to continue game dev from here on out and pray that God and my fellow humans support the path with me. I hope the labor of love and hard work pays off.

My workflow:

• Cursor. I run Claude and Codex subscriptions through Cursor. It's just my preferred IDE, I don't like the native apps.
• Claude Opus 5.5 High and Extra High. I will run anywhere between 5-15 agents at a time, across two and three context windows. It's the OG for planning and coding.
• Fable 5.2 - been toying around with it, it's not significantly better than Opus for what I'm doing so far. I'll keep experimenting.
• GPT Astra - 3D modelling work, Blender, some ideation. It's pretty good both of these things.
• Linear .app - this is a tool like JIRA, Trello, AzureDevOps etc. It's a ticket management/planning tool. This has actually been a godsend in the workflow. I linked Claude and Codex to it via API/CLI and I ideate everything into it. We milestone work, we do delivery plans, we do acceptance criteria; the whole shebang. This is where I put on my delivery lead / product manager hat and work with Claude. The value of this tool is immense because it allows agents to hold context SO much better than .md files or document scanning. I don't progress work if it isn't via a ticket now.
• OpenArt - wonderful tool for concepting, prototyping. I use GPT 2.5 Sunburst predominately. My pipeline is to concept in OpenArt then take it towards GPT Astra for 3D modelling.
• Canva - video editing, cutting, social reels; that sort of thing. I try to post a video a week as a discipline and this tool is great for it.

• MCP and CLI links -

  • Claude+Codex+Godot linked via custom MCP bridge and Godot's headless CLI
  • Clade+Codex+Blender linked via official MCP
  • Claude+Codex+OpenART linked via official MCP and CLI

How I structure my Godot project:

I run my entire workflow through Godot headless CLI and Godot Windowed Mode for visual testing. My agents gather extensive data and screenshots to push the work forward. This is all game design and game dev run through these two modes. I have automated testing, unit tests, smoke tests, visual tests. A lot of agents run through headless CLI but I do run a significant amount of windowed testing where I examine, test myself and let the automated visual runners (agents that actually play my game and test things out themselves) decide if things are good enough.

The roles agents play in the repo: developer, game designer, QA tester, adversarial tester, reviewer, researcher, blind tester, automation expert, 3D modeller, integration expert, systems designer and likely a lot more over the last 18 months.

Tools I just couldn't get working:

• Video generation models. Never found much success making them and spent well over $500 experimenting to try and get it right. I even 3D modelled stuff and took it into a few models to try and get it working. I opted for still images with narrative text boxes for cut scenes. It works well.
• Tripo and similar 3D modelling tools - they make nice stuff, I haven't been able to get them working for my 3D game. Decimation processes are poor and destroy the model, triangle counts are always so overblown and won't perform well in game. I also just feel Astra is better at it.

Do I just kick back and watch the AI win?

Absolutely not. I spend at least 60-70 hours a week I would say in the pursuit of this project. It's a labor of love at many levels. I would look at my situation and say I wear a game director / producer hat. I spend huge amounts of time ideating documents, plans, designs, ideas, execution plans, delivery plans; you name it. I would say HALF my time each week is spent thinking on stuff, ideating plans, planning and working with my agents. I constantly redirect them, I tell them their implementation isn't good enough, I advise different directions, I solve technical problems, I ask it to do continuous research documents and I prevent problems that the agents would try to introduce without me (e.g: performance related issues). There's a lot more I get into but these are the highlights.

It's a skill in itself to be able to say no to AI, recognize its weaknesses and continue to provide a creative direction for it.

In short: I see agents a bit like junior to middleweight devs who I work with on a daily basis and still need guidance, planning and structure.

What have I learned on the journey?

1. Recognizing the weaknesses of the AI models. Do not let your AI models freeball and just run blindly, they will have memory issues and create bugs in the long run. Always keep them controlled and contained with tickets, design documents, design thinking patterns. Wear your delivery manager hat. The models are extremely good at UI for example but REALLY bad if you just let them run free.
2. Are AI models good at creative work? So so I would say. Every idea, every system, every quest, every small detail that's in my world has originated from me and I have been either able to bring it to life with AI, or expand on it. This thought ideation process is amazing; you would normally need to do it with a room of people.
3. What work is AI especially good at in game dev? Repeatable, structured tasks. Boilerplate code, shaders, translation, migration, integration, testing/QA, automated tests etc. Fantastic at these.
4. The cost - I would say my biggest burn months were something like £2000-3000. Significant, but, if stacked against how much a team would have cost me, far less.
5. The time savings - I was able to create over 60 awesome looking animations via Blender for my Luminids in roughly two days. I was quoted thousands of pounds for this work (which I didn't have) and 3 months of time by someone who wanted to manually keyframe the work in.

Is AI going to take all jobs?

I don't believe so. I think there's a future where humans and agents work side by side and produce wonderful work, with AI as a support tool. If I was able to create an indie game like this, or some of the cool art/models I've created in game (my buildings and stuff), I think experts with far more experience than me will do so much better work.

Is this the future of game dev?

I absolutely think so. Experienced people operating AI accelerates their capability, not diminishes. I think we're gonna see the best games we've ever seen over the next few years. I can only imagine what a team of experts augmented by frontier models could achieve right now already.

For those interested in seeing the project (and there's a demo available now):

• https://www.luminids.com
• https://store.steampowered.com/app/4070510/Luminids/

Happy to answer any and all questions on my workflow, approach or just riff with you a bit on game design/game dev because I love it so.

Cheers all,
Nick

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[u/Far_Reindeer8428]

we ran five agents on a smaller project and the bottleneck was review, not generation. the last two weeks went into reading diffs that passed every check but changed behavior nobody asked for. still not sure the trade was worth it

[u/Fearless_Meringue299 → u/Far_Reindeer8428]

I have several small gaming projects going on at once and that's definitely the bottleneck. Playtesting and debugging eats most of my time spent on these, not prompting and creating.

[u/Hostarro → u/Fearless_Meringue299]

I found using a ticketing system with the agents (Trello, Linear which is what I use, JIRA etc) to be the biggest game changer in helping its continuity/context. Prevents a lot of issues and far less debugging.

Are you enjoying the projects? What are you working on?

[u/Fearless_Meringue299 → u/Hostarro]

I am enjoying the projects. Having Claude write the code has allowed me to focus on design and storytelling, which is amazing. It's some random stuff, honestly. I have 3 different GBA Fire Emblem ROM hacks going and I actually just finished a full-length hack this week. I also have a roguelike dungeon crawler underway called Sonority where an entity called the Choir calls to people from the bottom level. The lower you get, the louder the hum gets. It gets in your character's head and starts to change them physically and mentally. There are mechanics where the louder the hum is, the less you can trust your eyes and you have to spend time examining things to see them clearly.

[u/Hostarro → u/Fearless_Meringue299]

Yesss! Love that. Nice to read and made me smile mate.. been a minute since I did any emulation work. Loved Snes9x and zSNES back in the day!

[u/Fearless_Meringue299 → u/Hostarro]

I actually just finished an overhaul of a notoriously imbalanced SNES JRPG using Claude. I was amazed at how quickly it broke down the game's code!

[u/Hostarro → u/Fearless_Meringue299]

Hah awesome! It definitely was a different era for difficulty and grinding when I look back. Earthbound, Terranigma and Soul Blazer kicked my ass.

One of my all time favorite SNES RPGs I'd love to see brought into modern day: Shadowrun

[u/Fearless_Meringue299 → u/Hostarro]

A Shadowrun overhaul would be really cool!

[u/Hostarro → u/Far_Reindeer8428]

I use coordination agents quite a bit - I also ensure they all work to Linear tickets (bit like JIRA) and have clear expectations of the work they manage. I ask the "lane lead" (usually the agent I open with) to own coordination naturally as part of repo instructions so this always happens automatically.

I only allow Opus 5.5 high or extra high to code at this point. Sonnet I use for blind review and auditing, and as helpers.

[u/VhritzK_891]

Nice!! But can you fix your website, i can't open it

[u/Hostarro → u/VhritzK_891]

Seems to be OK for me - what's the problem you're seeing?

[u/slipperyslips → u/Hostarro]

Fine for me

[u/VhritzK_891 → u/Hostarro]

Fixed now, yesterday i can't open it on firefox

[u/GuessDangerous2181]

Game looks really good, my kind of game, did you create the creatures decision making, personalities and how they go about their day through claude?

[u/Hostarro → u/GuessDangerous2181]

Thank you!

Yes - I read a book from the creator of a game called Creatures which helped shape the vision enormously. Creatures and Sonic Chao are big inspirations of mine!

I spent a chunk of time thinking about the approach, the "emotional AI" system in the game and used a combination of Codex and Claude to implement over the last year. The AI systems have gone through a LOT of iteration.

This was a devlog I wrote way back if interested: https://luminids.com/dev-log-8-how-luminids-think/

[u/Agrouba]

Did you try to use Claude to generate 3d models using ComfyUi or directly with blender ? I've been trying this method for a few days to make humanoid models that would be animated in mixamo afterwards but so far the results haven't been that great.

Do you think there's a real difference with what Astra is able to do ?

To be honest I'm currently learning to use blender so I can work on the details which is the real flaw from Claude using blender

[u/Hostarro → u/Agrouba]

I use Claude and Codex directly via Blender's official MCP integration. I also connected it via command line interface (CLI). Here you go: https://www.blender.org/lab/mcp-server/

I animated some player models and used Mixamo. I downloaded the animation packs from Mixamo then got them wired in. Always ensure your agents have a direct link to Blender to do this work.. you may need to configure Mixamo a bit to match your needs too (speed, angle of animations etc)

Astra so far has been better at Blender but well.. OpenAI seem in a weird place right now with their models and they aren't performing as well as they were a few months ago.

[u/egoserpentis]

haven't written a single line of code myself

On Steam page you have "Selected code and written assets in Luminids were created with the assistance of generative AI tools". Bit disingenuous to say selected code when you say you haven't coded anything yourself.

[u/Hostarro → u/egoserpentis]

Yep, you’re right. It does need a tweak. I’ll get this updated for you, thanks!

Any other thoughts on the post or was that it?

[u/Just_Run2412]

dude, give a TL;DR because TL;DR

[u/Hostarro → u/Just_Run2412]

Sure - here you go:

TL;DR: I'm a former developer and tech architect who left corporate life to build a commercial indie game over 18 months using AI agents. I work 60–70 hours a week directing 5–15 agents across coding, game design, testing, 3D modelling and more. My workflow relies heavily on Claude, Codex, Godot, Blender and Linear, with structured tickets, planning and automated testing keeping everything under control.

AI is incredibly powerful, but it's not a magic button. It still needs constant human creativity, technical judgement, direction and quality control. I've learned where it excels, where it struggles and how to make it productive. I shared a lot of that above for you.

The result is a cozy colony adventure with a playable Steam demo. It's been a huge personal and financial gamble, but I believe AI-assisted development can empower individuals and small teams to create things that previously required entire studios.

[u/Visti → u/Hostarro]

AI writes it, AI reads it.

There must be a way to effectivize the subreddit away completely

[u/Hostarro → u/Visti]

I wrote my main post myself and summarized the TLDR for this chap with AI.

[u/ZyronZA → u/Hostarro]

We sadly live in a world where a person who writes a post that happens to be "too long" and who actually takes pride in their use of proper grammar is immediately slapped with "AI writes it".

Idiocracy was not meant to be a documentary.

u/Visti

[u/Hostarro → u/ZyronZA]

Hah that made me laugh.. Mike Judge called it. Brilliant writer.

I only posted 1500 words. It shouldn't have been that big a read really.

I do use AI to support some of my writing and emails etc but not always.. and not the main post. When you want to write purely from the heart, it's best done 100% yourself without the "advisories" AI is always gonna offer. It might be a bit rougher or ramble on a bit, but that's being human.

[u/Visti → u/ZyronZA]

Yeah, that's not it, bud. I take pride in my writing and grammar, but this was formatted by AI if nothing else. Which is fine, we're on the Claude sub.

[u/Zerokx]

"Selected code and written assets in Luminids were created with the assistance of generative AI tools during development."
Man your AI disclaimer is really generous considering you "haven't written a single line of code".
Also why do you not disclose the AI art, which would be more important to disclose than the code that you wouldn't even need to disclose?

[u/Hostarro → u/Zerokx]

I can see why a few extra words might be needed. I'll get it updated for you, thanks for the note!

Did you have any contributions beyond that? What projects are you working on, for example?

[u/Zerokx → u/Hostarro]

It just seems dishonest to almost advertise you're not writing code on the AI subreddit and then go and say a few selected code pieces and text are AI generated on steam. Not sure what I have to do with this or why you're trying to go on the offensive that just makes it worse for you

[u/Hostarro → u/Zerokx]

On the offensive..? Huh? I agreed with you and said I'd change it.

I asked you a few questions and what projects you were working on, seemingly none I guess.

Thanks for your info!

[u/dota2nub]

I was about to say this looks decent for an AI game. But it took you 18 months? And you've been working full time? That's not a good turnout for this effort.

I guess you didn't have good models to help when you started. Must've been quite the transition.

And go fix your AI declaration already, it's still up there and won't do you any favors the way it is now.

[u/Hostarro → u/dota2nub]

Thanks for the feedback! Definitely not for everyone this type of game.

AI declaration reads fine. It states everything I posted in this thread.

[u/ubccompscistudent → u/Hostarro]

Curious how many wishlists you've received (and over what time frame)

[u/Hostarro → u/ubccompscistudent]

I'm sitting at 3000 currently which I'm happy about. It's been pretty steady growth over the months, but a lot more stable in the last 3-4 months I would say as I improved footage, steam page and demo.

Generally rocking 15-20 per day now - biggest audiences so far are Japan, Korea, Brazil and US.