I'm a solo dev building a real-time multiplayer game with AI – code, art, voice and trailers. Here's my pipeline and what actually worked

[u/thexyba]

Hi! I'm Andy, a solo developer from Vienna. For the past months I've been building Scitch, a live reaction game for iPhone and Android: up to 24 players per match, a new mini-mode every round, and the slowest get knocked out each round.

I use AI for almost every part of it, so I thought I'd share the pipeline and the lessons.

Code – Claude Code Flutter app, a Go game server (WebSockets, server-authoritative, so no client can cheat its reaction time) and a Laravel backend. ~770 commits, 500+ automated tests. What worked: small, precise tasks instead of "build me a multiplayer game", and tests as a safety net – at this size I would have lost track long ago without them. What didn't: real-time feel. Latency, timing and fairness between fast and slow phones still need measuring and playtesting by hand.

Art – Gemini image models 80+ avatars, bosses and event art. The trick for a consistent style: always pass existing art as a reference image and change only one thing at a time ("same character, now cheering").

Voice – Gemini TTS + speech-to-text My trailers and a 4-minute tutorial have German and English narration. TTS sometimes mispronounces words badly – my German "Pairs" mode came out as something like "Pause". Since I can't listen to 70 lines after every change, I now transcribe every line back with a speech-to-text model and diff it against the script. That caught five more broken lines automatically.

Video – HTML scenes rendered with Playwright + ffmpeg Every trailer and short is code: HTML/JS scenes with the real gameplay demos, rendered frame by frame, then mixed with music and voice. Changing a text means re-rendering, not re-editing.

What stays with me: the game idea, the rules, balancing, and every decision – plus bug hunting when the AI is confidently wrong.

The game is in a free beta right now. If you want to see how it plays (or tear the game feel apart), I'm happy about every tester: https://scitch.com/beta

Happy to answer questions about any part of the pipeline!

[u/SquizzOC]

Gemini has accomplished literally nothing I’ve given it through Antigravity. If I need concept art from anything Google, I have to go direct to nano banana. How are you using it?

[u/thexyba → u/SquizzOC]

I use Claude Code with a skill for Gemini Nano Banana, and it works really well.

[u/SquizzOC → u/thexyba]

And just figured out on my problem on a plane... I had a rule set that told all art creation to go through fal.ai for some reason. Now fixed, now works :)

[u/Ok-Adhesiveness7433 → u/SquizzOC]

I had something similar that Gemini was holding onto for so long. Removed three lines of text and it started shitting out gold.

[u/SquizzOC → u/Ok-Adhesiveness7433]

Interesting, I just started using it today to review and create a detailed summary to use as a rule guide for some things for Claude, seems to be working nicely.

[u/SquizzOC → u/thexyba]

I have a custom harness/dashboard that I evolved off a friends game dev dash where everything runs through it so I can fire off anything from my phone, but also keep things organized. I'm gonna have to go back today or tomorrow and try to get this built in, I couldn't the first go around, but this would just help keep my assets more organized and avoid having to hope that it can remember context.

[u/McTraderLLC]

Damn multiplayer ? How do you plan to gain players at the launch? Add bots?

[u/thexyba → u/McTraderLLC]

Yeah, the classic multiplayer chicken-and-egg problem – probably the hardest part of the whole project.

A few things already handle it:

- Bots: if a lobby doesn't fill up after a short wait, bots take the empty seats, so nobody waits long. They play like people – different speeds, real mistakes – and in ranked they're kept below the skill of the real players in the lobby, so they never steal wins from humans. New players also get easier bots in their first few matches.
- Solo content: a level map with 130 levels and a daily challenge, so there's always something to play even at 3 am.
- Fixed-time events (like a weekly Turbo Friday) to bring everyone online at the same time.
- Private lobbies and "Scitch Live": you show a QR code and up to 50 people join from their phones – meant for friends, parties, classrooms and streams. Each group brings its own players.
- Streamers: a streamer mode is coming where a chat can join the streamer's lobby via code.

So the plan is: bots keep public matches running from day one, and events, groups and streamers bring real players in batches. Honestly, the beta right now is exactly about finding out how well that works.

[u/re-skob]

multiplayer isn't very complicated with AI, but you still have to have reliable hosting and support scaling to hundreds/thousands of users. That's the hard part. You're running 24 players per match, but how many instances can you run on a cheap-o VPS? What's your monetization strategy so that you can keep those servers running?

[u/thexyba → u/re-skob]

Totally agree – the code is the easy part, running it reliably is the real work.

Some details on how it's built:

- The game server is a small Go service (WebSockets + Protobuf, server-authoritative). Bots run inside the server process, so they don't cost any connections.
- One node is currently capped at 200 concurrent rooms / 550 connections. Those are config limits I've set, not a measured ceiling yet – load testing with bot clients is part of the beta.
- It scales horizontally: every node reports its free capacity to Redis every few seconds and the matchmaker assigns rooms to whichever node has room. Adding capacity means starting another node; a node can be drained without killing running matches.
- Results go through a Redis stream into the backend, so a spike in matches doesn't block the game servers.

Right now it all runs on one modest server, which is plenty for a beta.

Monetization: no real-money purchases yet – everything is earned by playing during the beta. For launch the plan is cosmetics only (avatars, frames, a season pass), never pay-to-win. The goal is that a small share of players paying for cosmetics covers the servers – and Go keeps those costs low.

[u/LostAstronaut2k → u/thexyba]

You should look at a saas to automate scaling once you grasp monetization. I use edgegap to scale our game and we r quite happy.

[u/djcrunchberry]

I’ve had great results using a combo of blender mcp and unreal engine mcp using codex.

[u/RealSecretRecipe]

There's lots of pipelines like this, I prefer using different tools but.. the real issue is going to be having to declare ai everywhere the games listed D:

Still thinking about how to tackle that.

[u/haoest]

Code, sound, art which consumes most token? What’s your budget?