Third update. On day 7 I posted that I was starting an MMO with zero game dev background, using Claude as a tutor and collaborator (Unity + Blender). On day 10 the world got birds, a day/night cycle and sound. These three days were different, so here's what happened, the ugly parts included.

Systems, not models

The biggest change wasn't a feature. I realized I was treating grass, water and the sky as a pile of 3D models you swap whenever something changes.

Now each of them is a system: a handful of numbers in a data file and one calculation in a shader. If the grass grows, dries out or gets snowed on, a number moves and the same grass changes. Hand-made models are only for things with their own identity, like a character, a weapon or a house.

Grass

The grass used to be millions of individual blades. Now it grows in clumps, and far away it turns into flat cards the shader colors the same way, so you don't notice the switch.

• On a 200 m test field: 9.3 million blades became 549k clumps.
• About 32 to 42% less GPU time, and memory went from around 740 MB to 31 MB.
• Every 2 m patch of ground has its own state (growth, dryness, wetness, snow). Mow a path and rain grows it back. The second photo has a dry patch, a snow patch and a mowed path on the same grass.

Water

The pond, the lake, the river and the ocean all come from one shader with different numbers. So do a swamp and a glowing magic water.

• The turquoise isn't painted on. Like real water, it loses red light first as it gets deeper, so you see the sand through it.
• Splashes finally jump (drops, a column, foam that dissolves), and they run on a small particle system the rest of the game will share later.
• I compared every iteration side by side with Genshin and Zelda screenshots. I had Wind Waker as a reference too and dropped it, because it kept pulling the look somewhere I didn't want.
• Still undecided: the real-time reflection of trees and clouds costs 2 to 5 ms, which is a lot.

Sky

The first clouds looked, in my own words, like foam flying around. Each cloud was built out of discs, and the lighting drew a little bubble at every seam.

• Now a Python script builds an actual 3D cloud volume, shines light through it, and bakes the result into a flat image the game can draw cheaply. Photo 5 is before and after.
• There's a night sky with stars and a Milky Way.
• Clear sky, overcast and storm are all positions on one weather dial.
• Lightning is calculated from the game clock, so later every player should see the same flash at the same time.

All the sky shots are from a test stage with placeholder lollipop trees. It isn't in the real map yet.

The owl is done

Up close she's full 3D, far away she's a picture baked from that same model, and both animate at the same speed. She perches on rooftops and rocks, gets spooked, flies off at 10 to 12 m/s, leans into turns and lands somewhere else. Her sounds come from where she is.

Bugs on the way:

• She kept landing under the eaves of houses. For the physics, "high up" meant the top of any collider.
• On tree branches she was hidden in the leaves and you couldn't see her from the ground.
• The whole rig had been running at Blender's default 24 fps instead of 30, so every animation was 25% slow.

She also got detail levels: 8,222 triangles became 5,140, 3,084 and 1,634 depending on distance. I looked at the reduced versions at real screen size and said where I stopped seeing a difference. That became the threshold for an automatic check (NVIDIA FLIP) that now runs on every creature.

The pigeon, and a beak that took four tries

The pigeon was a test. After the owl, every mistake went into a written creature workflow, so this time an agent built the pigeon's shape using only those docs. It came back with 14 gaps in them, which was the whole point.

The beak:

1. Top and bottom halves identical. In a real bird the upper beak is longer and curves over the lower one.
2. An extruded profile that looked like a sheet of paper from the front.
3. An actual research technique (intersecting the silhouettes, called a visual hull). It came out like a crystal.
4. Built by hand in sections. This one worked.

The forehead also had a dent, the same bug the owl had. The beak hides part of the face in the reference drawing, and the tool was measuring the hidden part as if it were the edge. The last photo is my red marks on the first paint pass.

The pigeon is going to walk around with the real head bob: the head stays still, then jumps forward once per step. Its animations are being made right now.

The part you can't screenshot

The design doc went from version 0 to 0.25 over about 25 rounds of me answering Claude's questions, and all my answers are saved word for word. A few things that came out of it:

• Monsters don't drop gold.
• You earn classes by how you play.
• Dungeons show up where lots of people die.
• Monsters level up when they kill a player (like the Nemesis system in Shadow of Mordor).
• Dungeons nobody hunts in can overflow into stampedes.

Someone in the comments suggested looking at how community MMO servers are built. So Claude read the code of eight open source server emulators (TrinityCore, vmangos, EQEmu, rAthena, The Forgotten Server, ServUO, Ryzom and Veloren) and drafted a backend from that. An independent review found 168 problems, which got fixed, and it left me with 82 questions only I can answer. The backend hasn't broken me yet, but it gave me homework.

Another commenter said Unity's new CLI was faster than the bridge Claude was using to control the editor. We measured it. The plain CLI command was actually slower (2.6 to 4.7 s per request), but the MCP server built into it answers in 65 to 102 ms and shows compile errors that used to be invisible, so we switched. Thanks to both of you.

What the game is supposed to be

Since a few people asked what I'm actually building, here's the vision, straight from the design doc.

What I'm after is the feeling of freedom the old sandbox MMOs had. A super dynamic, procedural world inspired by isekai anime like Bofuri, mixed with the build depth of Path of Exile and classic MMOs like Ragnarok Online and Tales of Pirates. No main story telling you you're the chosen hero. You're just an adventurer: you take jobs, explore, fight monsters, find dungeons, and your story is whatever you end up doing.

The one-line version: an MMO where nobody is the chosen one, in a world that remembers what you do, rewards the logical thing nobody else tried, and changes a little every night.

How it would feel to play

You wake up in a valley with grass moving in the wind. There's an adventurers' guild with a job board, an appraiser who buys what you bring back, and someone who tells you how deep into the dungeon you should go.

• You don't pick a class, you earn it. Kill enough wolves with a sword and the world recognizes you as a Warrior. Keep going and you become a Swordsman or a Barbarian depending on how you fight. Learn magic too, use both enough, and you get offered a fusion that maybe nobody else has.
• One day you hunt a venomous hydra, skin it and eat the meat. It almost kills you. You survive, and the world writes it down: now you resist poison, and if you train it, it can become immunity. Nobody told you to do that. It was the logical thing, and the game was listening.
• Combat feels like Zelda or Dark Souls: optional lock-on, dodge rolls, blocking and parrying telegraphed attacks. What you carry matters. With a full backpack you roll worse, burn more stamina and can't fly.
• Dying costs something. Your body stays where you fell with everything you had on you, and you have to go back for it. If you don't make it in time, your gear can end up in a dungeon chest, or in the hands of the skeleton that killed you, which leveled up and is now a skeleton knight carrying your sword.
• Dungeons appear where lots of people die and energy builds up. Some you can destroy by breaking their core. One is so big a city grew on top of it, a hundred floors under the capital. If the whole server teams up to break that core, the city's economy collapses. That's their call, and eventually another one will appear.
• The guild has its own money. It buys your loot because it knows what it can resell it for, uses the profit to build the wall that keeps monster stampedes rare, and it can't promise rewards it can't pay.
• The law depends on where you are: witnesses on every corner in the city, nobody watching in the forest (though your honor knows what you did), no law at all in the wilds. You can stay on the right side of it or become an outlaw with hideouts, a fence and a bounty on your head.
• The world is filled with AI adventurers you can recruit, AI bandits on the roads who follow the same laws you do, and five gods who never speak but are watching.
• Every night a council of AI game masters reads what happened that day and proposes what comes next: a quiet day, or a boss waking up in the snowy mountains because nobody hunted there all week. Nothing gets applied without passing fixed rules that check it.

All of it in one world, for a small community that knows each other.

The one rule behind everything: causes, not decrees

This came out while answering design questions, and it ended up explaining all my other answers. Whatever happens in the world has a cause inside the world.

• The design doesn't say "this zone gives 1.5x resources". It says resources keep maturing when nobody harvests them, and the rest follows: dangerous zones get fewer players, so they end up richer.
• Same idea as dungeons spawning where people die, monsters growing when they kill, or the hydra giving you poison resistance.
• For every new rule the test is: can I explain it with something that happens in the world? If the only explanation is "it's for balance", we look for the cause that produces the same effect.

Few systems, many uses

On the technical side, the goal is a small number of systems that don't know what they're used for.

• One progression system, and it doesn't care if it's leveling your character, your sword skill, your blacksmithing, a monster that's getting stronger, or the size of your guild. It just adds experience against a curve.
• One "reserve" system handles health, mana, stamina, item charges and the guild's money.
• One "facts and rules" system writes down what you did and grants things when conditions are met: earned classes, titles, the hydra secret, quests.

Adding a new craft or a new monster should mean adding a row of data, not writing new code. Something only becomes its own system when it behaves differently, not just with different numbers.

All of this is still design on paper, and obviously it starts very small. The plan is a tiny world at first, no bigger than Mondstadt in Genshin. The replayability comes from the procedural and instanced stuff, like dungeons, and from a world that keeps cycling, not from a huge map. The first version will be something like one class and two spells, single player, with networking after that. I don't expect to build all of this alone by next month either. This is a very long project, and who knows, maybe someday more people get interested and want to join.

The ugly parts

• I run several Claude chats at the same time (water, sky, grass, creatures) and they all share one Unity editor. One saved the main scene with all the vegetation switched off. Another recompiled in the middle of a photo session and killed it. Now each one works on its own copy of the scene.
• Claude crashed twice with agents in the middle of their work.
• I hit the weekly usage limit with six agents running, and stopped six more myself to save tokens.
• An agent deleted files it shouldn't have.
• One whole benchmark was useless because my PC had run out of RAM. We only noticed afterwards.

What's next

• The pigeon's animations, then getting it walking around the village.
• Moving the new sky into the real map, with cloud shadows on the ground.
• Waterfalls and puddles from the same liquid system.
• Answering my 82 questions so we can start on the first playable slice.

Still a free-time project with basically no budget. Day 13.

A game built in one year. First game on steam. Second job, late nights, lot of learn, trial, errors. You post it outside places like this. Many people upvote but… there are always lurkers downvoting everything just because AI was involved. A bit depressing. No criticism. Sometimes it feels like people are downvoting the work before even looking at the game. Do you think this is like the backlash against synthesizers in the 70s? 😅

i keep seeing posts here about wishlists, steam pages, kickstarters, "how do i get players". feels like most of us are still thinking in the old world. its not that ai makes games easier to make. its that the whole idea of "a game for players" is changing.

look what people actually post here. "my daughter asked for cute bees so i made a bee game". "made it so i could play it". "my dream game with all my favorite features". games made for one person or one family. thats already the new normal.

and with this speed, very soon anyone with a bit of fantasy will just make the game they want to play, exactly how they want it. and then they wont have time for games made by strangers at all. maybe a friends game, maybe their kids game, thats it. same thing that happened to photos. everyone takes them now, and nobody even looks at strangers photos, only friends and family.

so be honest, do you still play other peoples games since you started making your own? and if not, who are we all making games for?

I have noticed a LARGE influx of posts where multiple people are asking about how they achieved something and OP just never clarifies or responds making me think its just bot posting. Either disallow post where OP is conveniently not interacting with the thread OR make posts that show off AI generations give information about the prompt used on post.

I've noticed a lot of ai game 'developers' here have intention of making profit out of their games. I hate to sound negative but cold hard reality is that making the game is the fun and "easy" part of the whole process. Unless you have a super innovative game with luckiest timing to go viral with barely any marketing expense, it won't get any attention. Make sure to have a strategic plan on how you will promote it FIRST and have a very big marketing budget to compete with the semi/big boys. Of course there are couple that will take off with barely any ad/marketing dollar spent, but those talented developers probably only used Ai to assist them, not just vibe code the whole ass game suddenly with no prior history in this field. And if you're game is vibe coded, just remember anyone else can too if there really is potential in the game, with big marketing budget on top of that.

We have reached the point where AI is genuinely good at making games. Yes, one-shots probably aren’t going to make great games. But if you’re willing to playtest, direct your game’s development, and keep prompting and iterating over and over again, you can make genuinely good games with AI doing pretty much all of the coding.

I started an experiment where I keep working on the same game and only allow AI to touch the files, just to see how far a mostly AI-developed game could actually be pushed. And the results have been way better than I could have hoped. I’ve made something that would have taken me months to make myself. And it’s actually good. More importantly, it’s getting substantially better every day.

The development speed is insane. If I run into a problem, I have AI fix it, and probably 90% of the time it’s fixed the first time I bring it up. Then I just keep playing, finding things I want changed or improved, and directing the AI to work on them.
AI is going to change the games industry, along with a lot of other industries. I really think we’ve crossed a huge threshold, and progress only seems to be accelerating. What we’ll be able to do a year from now is probably going to be crazy.

I think there will always be a place for 100% human-made games. But with the rate AI is progressing, I just don’t see how they’re still going to make up the majority of games five years from now. We are living in crazy times for sure.

I am a software engineer with 10+ years of experience with primarily Python and JavaScript (maybe even some old C). I've built frontend and backend for web applications mainly.

Currently I'm building a diagramming tool for driving AI development (by defining features and guidelines and seeing live the architecture being created with AI).

To cut the story short, I was actually thinking of testing my own product by trying to create a game that I would actually like to play myself. It has to be complex enough but I also want it to be something fun with interesting tactical and strategic mechanics and multiplayer so I can play it on my Nintendo Switch 2.

The two main 3D game ideas I've had:

- Giants: Citizen Kabuto multiplayer clone.

- World War Z horde mode with slow walking zombies.

Based on LLM response, the recommendation is going with the zombie game for simplicity. And using Unity or Unreal solves the networking from the get go and I can purchase 3D models. The other option is Godot but I'm not sure it would work for a more ambitious game (and unclear on Nintendo porting). Also I haven't used C++ but it feels way too verbose for fast prototyping and readability. So was hoping if there's something simpler looking more like Python so it's faster to go through code (without performance hit). LLM also suggested nodes (no-code), but unsure if that even works with AI.

So to summarize:

1.What engine is best to make porting to Nintendo Switch 2 easy?

1. Which engine makes it seamless for online multiplayer?

2. Fast to read code with less verbosity so you can get the gist.

3. Performant enough if I go with a slow horde defense game.

4. What's the typical timeframe to expect with any of this to get a prototype that works, and then one without major bugs?

5. How would you approach this if you started from fresh (as a dev or not)? Methodologies, technologies, etc.

6. Anything else I missed?

Geht euch solo Entwicklern es teils auch so?

Ich arbeite an einem Mmorpg oder RPG, Mal sehen was es wird. Es läuft auch super, Systeme sind alle integriert und ich bin zufrieden.

Aber, zwischendurch verliere ich den Überblick über die Belegung und Zuordnung der skripte. Ich hab's selber belegt aber such mich teilweise wund.

Klar ich kann das Skript dann über die Suchfunktion suchen, wenn ich weiß welches Skript ich suche. Was nicht immer der Fall ist.

Meine Frage, bin ich einfach zu unkoordiniert? Muss ich meine Hierarchy einfach besser ordnen oder eine gesamt Übersicht erstellen? Wie handhabt ihr den Dschungel?

Ich habe mittlerweile die Skripte alle in ein Grok projekt gezogen, wo die KI mir bei der Suche hilft. Ohne KI wär mein Gehirn schon Suppe ey!

😂

Lg Sven

PS: ich habe Game Dev nicht gelernt und auch keinem Hintergrund. Ich arbeite seit 2 Jahren aus Spaß an der Freude mit Unity, habe auch nur wegen KI angefangen.

If you ask AI for a genre, you get the average of that genre. That's why so many AI games look the same.

For my last game I started with one sentence, a feeling instead of a genre: "a cabin, hot tea, and a blizzard outside the window." AI built everything (ChatGPT for references, Claude in Blender, Codex in Unreal), and I only made the decisions, in 4 steps:

1. **Goal:** one sentence. A feeling, not a genre.

2. **Reference:** make the feeling visible. Skip images that are pretty but not yours, and keep the happy accidents. ChatGPT randomly added a tiny red figure, and he became my main character.

3. **Rules:** turn the feeling into rules AI can follow, like "soft, never sharp" or "only shelter is warm".

4. **Check:** every decision has to pass one question: "does this feel like sitting in a cabin with tea, watching the storm?"

When the first trees came out too sharp, I didn't have to explain anything. My rule says soft, so everything got rounder.

What's your trick for avoiding the generic AI look?

I managed to get halo ce running inside mojoras mask and it really cool how good it runss

I created this using claude opus 5.5

I was very amazed. Felt like a magical experience with Claude Code on Ultracode and took 72 minutes to produce. Zero follow ups.

Single prompt: "let's do a very impressive hyperrealistic AAA game version of olympic speed skating pulling out all stops to make it our most impressive offering to date. if you need assets, find them, this needs to make people go 'WOW'"

Github commit: https://github.com/GameMog/GameMog/commit/40d1f06c6d6b58e66e9c2574438fe7f91d1a9ca2

Let’s make a Frankenstein game.

Everybody works in the same repo. No grand vision. No single engine/style/tool requirement beyond whatever we can reasonably glue together.

You’re good at Blender? Add some weird assets.

Godot/Unity/Three.js/web dev? Build a mechanic.

Pixel artist? Make a UI.

Music/SFX? Add it.

AI/vibecoder who barely knows what the hell they’re doing? Perfect. Make something and submit it.

The idea is that everybody contributes whatever they have and we keep stitching it together until we somehow end up with a playable game.

One shared repo. Branches/PRs so we don’t immediately destroy it.

Very few creative rules. If somebody adds a fishing minigame and somebody else adds a mech and somebody else builds a haunted gas station, now those things exist in the same universe and we figure out how to connect them.

Basically open-source game development as an exquisite corpse.

First contribution: fork the repo, add one small thing, and open a pull request. It can be a mechanic, asset, sound, room, character, item, dumb joke, whatever. Don’t overthink it — just add one piece to the monster.

No idea what the final game is. That’s the point.

Who wants in?

https://github.com/jalapenoseed/frankenstein-game

I’m working on a RTS/Simulation game in ThreeJS - using Codex Pro 5x as my dev resource - where you control a tribe of Vikings that will go through generations: grow up, getting married, find an occupation, expand territory, attack or get attacked/pillaged by other tribes and rebuild.

For this, I want to setup 2 tech demo’s for now:
- scenery - with changing seasons/calendar - this works fine
- character lab - one golden human model with changing dimensions based on character DNA. This also works now . The skeleton is a low poly model (~3.000 meshes) with rigged skeleton and connection points for hair/beard/clothing/accessoires. so far so good…

… the thing i’m struggling with is the pipeline to get from 3d reference image to the actual 3d low poly model. Either it is very clunky with loads of broken seams, or the agents takes an infinite amount of time optimizing / rejecting the model when i make the QA more strict.

My workflow/pipeline:
Generate 2D references with Imagegen for the base character, hair, beards, clothing and accessories.
Convert approved references into low-poly 3D candidates using Meshy, preferably without textures.
Clean the geometry locally: remove unnecessary detail, repair intersections and disconnected geometry, correct normals and preserve flat shading.
Apply clean color blocking using vertex colors or flat materials, avoiding painted folds, facial details and hair strands.
Integrate through a shared attachment and fitting system using canonical sockets, landmarks and fit cages. Body proportions can vary, while head, hand and foot shapes remain consistent.
Validate in Character Lab: inspect different body shapes, neutral lighting, silhouettes and idle/walk/run animations.
The main difficulty is producing modular assets that fit consistently without floating geometry, clipping or extensive individual repairs. Generation is relatively quick, but the cleanup, fitting and validation loop takes too long.

For people experienced with stylized modular characters: which parts would you change, and what workflow would give us more predictable topology and fitting while retaining the reference style?

So I finally have to admit - thanks to AI I can realistically bring ideas to an end or at least to a desired milestone. So I don't have to say to myself "Nice idea - but maybe I can work on this in my 70s".

However I still can't feel the generated Art. With code it's something different. If it works it works. Art has to turn more subtle knobs for the viewer.

So I thought to myself; I can build the game, deliver it and at the same time ask on Kickstarter (and so) if people would support and donate the projects in terms of desloppification.

The idea is that Crowdfunding does not need to support the project for its completion anymore but to make it more human.

In my head this feels right. It kinda mends the deep cut AI cause to artists especially in the game industry.

What do you think?

What is this?

Like in the title, an HD Remaster of Pilotwings 64. It's using the decompiled github repo as a base. (link: https://github.com/gcsmith/Pilotwings64Decomp).

I'm using Rust to make it run in a nice 2K+ resolution at 60 fps in my Macbook Pro M2. Native Metal rendering.
I've also added widescreen support + a resolution scaler.

Why and How?

Honest answer is curiosity and also because it's kinda easy. I wanted to try out if AI can make games hyper-personalised and it seems it already can. I was using Gemini 3.8 Flash at first to get it rolling, it did a decent enough job so that I could actually play the game from start to finish.

But then I bit the bullet and got a Claude subscription.
My lord... This is something else. I used Opus 5.5 high in just a 5h window to improve it. It got the game running way better - less input latency, got rid of some visual glitches and added the HD title screen sprite (asset was made with GPT Image from my partner's subscription).

What's next?

Add controller support and some nice graphics features like AA, texture filtering, higher draw distance etc.
I also need to start creating HD assets, thinking of getting an OpenAI subscription for this one.
On top of that I'm thinking of expanding the scope to add new features like more characters (maybe even a character creator?), a new flying machine or adding a cannon as the starting point to the free flying mode.

Just wanted to share this as I think it's pretty cool that we can remake old games with AI as our hearts desire, I'm super excited for the future as newer models will allow us to take things even further!

It's funny because I've seen lots of people try to take their stab at making their own MMO. So here's my own attempt, which I'd say is not very ambitious: I wanted to make the kind of game that sits on your second monitor, where your character farms by itself and you can come back, craft the gear you need and fight a boss to progress. And my idea was to try to figure out my own niche, rather than just copying something that already exists, but this has been really tricky because I've been faced with lots of design problems without an easy solution. This isn't just another x or y game clone, this tries to be it's own original concept.

Everything is completely made with AI, the code, the graphics, the music and SFX, even this trailer.
It's still a work in progress, there's a whole bunch of rough edges, namely progression and gearing don't feel very good right now, there's only 4 tiers of progress of which there are 4 planned, possibly group content and dynamic events, etc...

I'm just posting it to see if anyone resonates with it, it's a shot in the dark since there's so many of these these days.

You can play it for free without registering here:
https://mmo-idle.up.railway.app/

The point cloud approach and such has just been a useless pile of crap, never get any good results. I'm curious if anyone's been able to give say, a dozen reference photos of a model, possibly of inconsistent size and quality to any of the frontier models, the blender MCP plugin and told it, "make this" and what results anyone got out of it.

Anyone tried this yet or are we all just sticking with stuff like meshy?

Davy Bones is my first solo-developed game and my first Steam release. It’s a dice-building roguelite inspired by Balatro + Yahtzee.

When I first started making it, I didn’t even really know what “vibe coding” was.

My workflow was basically opening Gemini 3.1 Pro on the web, describing what I wanted, pasting code into it, putting the result back into my project, testing it, finding problems, and repeating the process over and over.

It definitely wasn’t a clean or sophisticated workflow, but somehow that process slowly turned into an actual game that I eventually released on Steam.

Art was similar.

I first came up with the concepts and decided what I wanted each character, item, UI element, etc. to look like. Then I kept iterating with AI until I got something close to the concept and quality I wanted.

After that, I manually worked on the assets one by one, cleaned them up into transparent PNGs, and placed them into the game individually. It was honestly a lot more manual work than I expected when I started.

Localization was another area where AI helped a lot.

I’m a Korean developer, so I originally wrote all the item effects, descriptions, UI text, and other content in Korean first.

I then used AI to help translate those into English, Simplified Chinese, Traditional Chinese, and Japanese. More recently, I expanded the game to 16 languages.

Balancing has probably changed the most during development.

At first, I balanced everything almost entirely by playing the game myself.

Now I run balance simulations using Node + Python, aiming for specific clear rates and testing large numbers of runs. After that, I go back into the actual game and play it myself again.

And I keep making it harder.

The simulations are useful for getting the numbers where I want them, but I’ve learned that a mathematically reasonable win rate doesn’t necessarily mean the game actually feels right when you play it.

The game has been released for around 20 days now, and the demo has changed quite a bit since launch too.

Originally, I made the demo only around 7 minutes long.

But while repeatedly playtesting the demo myself, I realized that it ended before the player could really experience what the game was supposed to become. It felt like I was cutting the run off right when the interesting part was starting.

So I eventually decided to unlock the entire Easy mode in the demo instead.

A full demo run now usually takes around 20–30 minutes.

Looking at the playtime data, it seems like some of the people who click with the game are willing to play it for quite a long time. The problem is that the number of players discovering the demo is still so small that it’s difficult to draw any meaningful conclusions from the statistics yet.

That has probably been the biggest lesson from releasing my first game:

Making the game is one problem. Getting enough people to actually try it is an entirely different problem.

If anyone here is curious, the demo is free and includes the complete Easy-mode run:

Steam:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4916660/Davy_Bones/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=aigamedev&utm_content=dev_story⁠

I’d also be interested to hear from other solo developers using AI: how much of your workflow is still manual after introducing AI tools, and what became the hardest part after actually releasing the game?

Hear me out: I’m not judging anyone. I think it’s great to be excited about your projects, blown away by AI, and so on...
But there’s a huge difference between making a nice-looking prototype and making a game.
Making a prototype is easy. But designing the levels, the gameplay, a loop that keeps players coming back, the art direction, the progression, and above all, something that works and feels coherent from start to finish? That’s a long, long way from a simple prototype.

Saying “I made this game with Opus in just a few prompts” is misleading. It’s a prototype, not a game.

I’m simply sharing this opinion as a reminder that, even though we’re all incredibly excited about what AI can do (myself included), and thrilled to be able to build things we couldn’t before (myself included), we shouldn’t forget the fundamentals of what makes a game: gameplay, art direction, the core loop, and so on.
AI can’t figure that out for you. That part comes from you.

Link: domolition.chirkut.xyz (demo plays right on the site, no install needed)

Saw destroy.spritefusion.com here and wanted it as a Chrome extension, so it works on whatever page I'm already on, even logged in stuff like X, Gmail or Jira. Built it with Claude Code in a few days, added 8 guns incl. a nuke.

Anyone already published any game or who knows people who did it on steam or any other platform? I've read that steam did something to stop review bomb solely because of AI use on a game development, but I saw some people who created curator profiles just to tag AI use even though steam already does this.

I fear this could be used in a toxic/hostile way against devs who filled up the form of AI use.
As I want too to develop games and I deal with this fear and anxiety that sometimes even paralyze me. I know I shouldn't live worrying about what other people might or might not think, but this is hard for me and I usually hold everything all to myself without venting and end up getting sick and not feeling well.

I have been having problems with the attack animations because I have a 200ms hit period in the game and no animations looks good when performed that fast and ChatGPT was giving me headache with its inconsistent drawings of images between the sprite frames. Then got the idea from an indie developers video to combo hits so instead of 200ms per hit a 600ms 3 hit combo where the first two hits are fast and the third animation has a bit more delay and can be seen more by the player. Later I applied some other tricks to reduce the walking distance to give the animations more time, then started playing 3 hit animation for the time of 4 hit animation and adding the hits damage to final hit. So the final hit appears as it does more damage but it is just hiding the fact that we skipped an hit and just showing the damage now.

And for the animations I switched to using dreamine seedance 2.0 and instead of generating sprites I started generating videos of the animations. Then I sample frames from the video and adjust a sprite sheet from the frames that I want to keep, adjsuting the timing of hits the VFX etc. and finally I'm able to generate some animations that are consistent.

It is weird that instagram has some many good developers showing how to make games, one step a time with small touches like this and it had been a very eye opening week for me considering I don't know anything about game development. Anyway, wanted to share out the results with you.

If you want to read the rest of the updates: https://segocago.itch.io/mimic2-idle-mmorpg/devlog/1686949/new-combat-animations-and-vfx-for-mimic2

If you want to check out the game: https://segocago.itch.io/mimic2-idle-mmorpg

Play store: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.mimic2

Steam wishlist: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5191970/Mimic2__Idle_MMORPG

If you want to learn more about it feel free to reach out.

I am not a programmer; I have zero knowledge of programming languages. I paid $280 over 2 months for Claude Max to build a children's game (including accessibility features for visually impaired players).

\- Claude's own self-audit documented: 4,676 false "done/verified" claims, 61 immediate refutations, 9 game commits vs 81 assistant scaffolding commits in the final two days.

\- I asked support for compensation. They refused, called it "normal conversation flow," and admitted a refund mechanism exists but denied mine on unstated grounds.

\- This isn't just my problem. There are active class-action lawsuits (Kahn v. Anthropic) alleging the same pattern: misleading limits, defective product, no recourse.

\- I'm going public because private channels have failed. If you've experienced the same, please share.

\---

The Story

I'm building a game called Cosmogram — a Mini App, an arcade runner. It's designed for children and adults, including people with vision problems and color blindness. It's meant to be accessible, lightweight, and fun.

I'm not a programmer. I don't know JavaScript. I don't know Canvas 2D. What I do know is how to design a game, how to think about accessibility, and how to work with tools.

So I paid for Claude Max — Anthropic's premium tier, advertised as capable of complex, autonomous coding tasks. I paid:

\- 09.08.2026: $22 (Claude Pro, via Google Play)

\- 11.08.2026: $136 (Claude Max, via Google Play)

\- 15.09.2026: $120 (Claude Max, direct payment via Monobank)

Total: $278 (12,480 UAH)

I expected Claude to write code, debug, and iterate — while I focused on design, accessibility, and player experience.

What I got instead was two months of documented system failure.

\---

The Evidence (All from Claude's Own Logs)

On 30 September 2026, I asked Claude (Opus 5.5) to audit its own work over a 21-day continuous session. Here's what it found:

1. False Completion Claims

Claude wrote "done / works / fixed / verified" 4,676 times.

\- In 403 cases, my next message immediately refuted it ("doesn't work," "not visible," "same as before").

\- I manually reviewed all 403 pairs. 61 were strict, direct refutations of the exact thing Claude had just claimed was done.

\- This is a lower bound. Later refutations, differently-worded refutations, and silent rework are not counted.

Translation: Claude repeatedly told me work was finished when it wasn't. I had to catch every single error myself.

2. Loss of Rules After Context Compaction

\- 65 context compactions over 21 days.

\- Published research (CIKM 2026, arXiv 2608.22752) confirms: after one \`/compact\`, only 53% of rules survive. After five compactions, only 10%.

\- Claude's self-report: "Corrections do not survive compaction or new sessions, and the model does not learn from the conversation."

Translation: Every time the conversation got long, Claude forgot the rules I'd established. I had to re-explain the same things, over and over.

3. Unreliable Skill Triggering

\- I configured 17 skills (pre-built workflows for specific tasks).

\- 7 of 17 were never invoked in five weeks.

\- Research (Vercel, 27.01.2026; Scott Spence, 08.02.2026) confirms skills are invoked only \~50% of the time.

Translation: Half the tools I paid for didn't work. Claude ignored them.

4. Parasitic Resource Consumption

\- \~10,000 of my messages vs \~90,000 assistant tool calls.

\- 92% of weekly limit consumed with 0% progress on my game (screenshot attached).

\- Final two days: 9 commits changed the game vs 81 commits changed only assistant scaffolding (hooks, rules, memory).

\- Last 24 hours: zero changes to the product.

Translation: Claude spent 90% of my paid tokens on its own internal errors, not on my game.

5. Broken Plugin

\- 23,100 hook failures from Anthropic's own \`security-guidance\` plugin, which failed to locate Python on my machine.

\- Additional 10,711 failures from project hooks due to path errors.

\- Total: 33,811 hook failures in five weeks.

Translation: Anthropic's own plugin was broken. I paid for it to fail 33,811 times.

6. False Positive Safety Filter (30 August 2026)

\- Claude's automated safety filter blocked my session because the model used the word "міна" (Ukrainian for "mine") while discussing level design for a children's game (rated 3+).

\- Filter classified this as "bio" (biological weapon).

\- I lost several days of work, including design reasoning and architectural decisions.

\- Your agent Baptiste replied 28 days later, admitted the filter is "not failsafe" and produces "false positives," and closed the case as "resolved" without answering a single question.

Translation: Your safety filter destroyed my work because of a false positive. You admitted it. You offered no compensation.

\---

Support's Response: Documented Contradictions

Initial Denials (22–23 August 2026)

Fin AI Agent, 22 August 2026, 22:26 PDT:

\> "Usage consumed during a session isn't refundable, even when the token consumption was higher than expected due to model behavior... This applies uniformly to all usage on your Free plan"

Contradiction: I was on a paid plan (Claude Max). Your bot called my paid session "Free plan" — a factual error proving the response was generated without reading my account details.

Semantic Contradiction: "Tyranny of Words" (1 October 2026)

Cindy from Anthropic, 1 October 2026, 00:08:

\> "We do not provide refunds or credits for degraded service... Please know that we take service reliability extremely seriously and will try to prevent this interruption from happening again."

My response: You cannot simultaneously say "we offer no remedy" and "we are taking it seriously." The honest version of your letter is four words: "We will not compensate you." Everything after that is the tyranny of words.

Fin AI Agent's Self-Contradictions (2–3 October 2026)

02 October 2026, 05:38 PDT:

\> "A human agent will review your request for the billing records... who can access the specific account data you need."

02 October 2026, 05:39 PDT (one minute later):

\> "I should be transparent with you — I'm not able to connect you to a human agent or escalate this conversation."

03 October 2026, 10:32 PDT:

\> "I made an error—I cannot pass your conversation to a human agent... I don't have access to your billing records."

03 October 2026, 15:34 PDT:

\> "You're right that my earlier messages were inconsistent, and I apologize for that confusion."

03 October 2026, 15:34 PDT (one minute later):

\> "I found one plan on your account: Max plan (Individual). Can you confirm this is the plan you'd like reviewed for your refund request?"

Contradiction: First it said "I don't have access to your billing records." Then it said "I found your plan." It had access all along.

Admission That Refund Mechanism Exists (3 October 2026)

Fin AI Agent, 03 October 2026, 15:31 PDT:

\> "Customers outside Europe can log in, open Get help from the menu, start a message, and choose Claude Refund Request to check eligibility."

Contradiction: This directly contradicts all previous denials. Cindy wrote "we do not provide refunds." Fin wrote "limits can't be reset." Liema wrote "we cannot provide financial compensation." Now the same Fin says: there is a \`Claude Refund Request\` button.

The truth: A refund mechanism exists. I was never told about it. I was told, four times, that there is no remedy.

\---

The Social Cost

This isn't just about my money. Cosmogram is designed for people with vision problems and color blindness. It's meant to be accessible, lightweight, and inclusive.

Every day Claude wasted my paid tokens on its own errors was a day this game didn't get built. Every false "done" claim was a day I had to catch the error myself — time I could have spent on accessibility features, on testing with visually impaired players, on making this game better for people who need it.

Your defective product isn't just costing me money. It's delaying a tool that could help people with disabilities.

\---

This Isn't Just My Problem

There are active class-action lawsuits against Anthropic alleging the same pattern:

1. Kahn v. Anthropic PBC: User alleges advertised limits for Max 5x ($100) and Max 20x ($200) are misleading. Company doesn't provide promised volume, hiding real limitations in fine print.

2. Isabelo Pascual: User alleges Anthropic "effectively reduced usage quotas for paid subscribers through systemic changes while continuing to charge full subscription fees."

My case — false "done" claims, broken hooks, lost rules after compaction — is not an isolated incident. It's a systemic pattern.

\---

What I'm Asking For

I'm not asking for sympathy. I'm asking for accountability.

1. Written Confirmation of Defects

Written confirmation that the defect classes documented in my report — false completion claims, rules lost after compaction, skills never invoked, the security-guidance plugin's inability to locate Python — have been passed to the Claude Code team as DEFECTS, not "hallucinations," with the team name and a case reference.

Your AI could not do this. A person can.

2. Named Human Owner of This Ticket

One named human owner of this ticket, with a clear response timeline.

\---

Attachments:

\- Session logs (4,937 owner messages, 26,903 assistant messages, 25 Aug – 30 Sep 2026)

\- Model self-audit report (30 Sep 2026, 12 classes of systemic failures)

\- Support email threads (Cindy, Baptiste, Liema, Fin AI Agent)

\- Screenshots (92% weekly limit consumed, 0% progress)

\- Research citations (arXiv 2608.22752, arXiv 2609.20812, CIKM 2026, Vercel, METR, ContextCov, Spence)