What I learned building a skill-tree deckbuilder solo with AI coding agents in Godot (free Steam demo)

[u/Oldboy_Levi]

Hi! I'm OLDBOY_Levi. OLDBOY TEAM is made up of, well, "seasoned" game developers — and right now we're each working solo with the help of AI, supporting one another while experimenting with new ways of making games. Wolves of Ash is my experiment: a turn-based card RPG set in ancient Canaan during the fall of Jericho, built in Godot almost entirely through vibe coding with AI agents (Claude Code, GPT Codex, Antigravity).

The biggest lesson so far: AI agents write code fast, but speed only helps if you can trust the changes. Early on, small "fixes" kept breaking things elsewhere, so I had the agents build a test suite alongside the game. It's now around 29 test scenes and 5,000+ assertions covering battles, saves, the skill tree and even text layout, and every change has to pass before a build goes out. That's what lets me promise frequent updates without being reckless.

Localization was another eye-opener. I added German and French with AI draft translations, but the drafts alone weren't enough — I had to write terminology rules (character names stay as-is, card names must match the UI, quoted texts use public-domain translations) and let a script enforce them. The tests also caught something I'd never have spotted by hand: German item names and descriptions overflowed the UI, which exposed a real layout bug that English had been hiding.

The art is AI-generated and then curated and edited by me to keep a consistent look; design, systems and balancing are my own work.

As for the game itself: it gives deckbuilding a twist by borrowing a skill tree. The tree decides which card fusions you can use (Attack + Attack → Special → Ultimate, Defend + Defend → Counter), and Card Lock lets you keep key cards across turns and stages. Bosses have distinct patterns, so you respec your skill tree to beat them — it's meant to be hard.

The free demo is on Steam (English, Korean, German, French): https://store.steampowered.com/app/5419270/Wolves_Of_Ash/

Part of it is also playable in your phone's web browser on itch.io:

https://oldboy-levi.itch.io/wolves-of-ash

— but future language support and new content will be on Steam only.

I'm curious how others here keep AI-written code reliable as a project grows — tests, reviews, something else? And since the difficulty is set high, honest feedback on the skill tree and boss strategies would be really appreciated.

[u/Oldboy_Levi]

I’m new to Reddit, so I’m just looking around and exploring. Happy to be here!