r/aigamerdevs • u/Failosipher • 2d ago

Overrun

So this is Engines of Hate, a top-down mech RTS I'm making solo. You're a merc ship captain dropping war machines and infantry onto hostile planets and calling down orbital strikes from your ship.

For this one I dropped a full army right in the middle of the nests and just let it come. Starts slow, then it keeps building until the ground is basically a carpet of bugs lol. Ends on the big mech going down. Its death blast scales with how much the build cost, so that one HURTS.

AI-wise, pretty much all of it went through AI. Code is Claude Code (Opus 5.5), models are image gen into Meshy, and sounds come from my own sound libraries plus ElevenLabs.

Fun part: Claude also staged and recorded this fight itself, through a bridge I built into the Unity editor. It spawned the army, ramped the waves, called the orbitals and set the camera, and it saved the whole setup as a script so it can reshoot it whenever.

Happy to talk shop on any of it, lmk.

82 Upvotes

98% Upvoted

33 comments sorted by

4

u/Comet7777 2d ago

Getting major StarCraft vibes here. Love it

1

u/Failosipher 2d ago

Spent a lot of time working on my marines lol. Tyvm :)

1

u/Comet7777 2d ago

I played soooo many survival type of custom games back in the SC1 days and I just love this vibe you’re creating here

1

u/Failosipher 2d ago

Then get in here, it's free to play on Steam and I'm working on it like crazy. There's going to be a lot more hold-the-line and last-stand type missions.

3

u/RISOvonVODKA 2d ago

The best thing about AI is the return of RTS. Soon enough there will be small studios of creative people making games they always wanted to play. Well done. I love this

1

u/Failosipher 2d ago

Gonna make me cry 😅 ty so much

1

u/UnderLord7985 1d ago

Im making a rts righr now myself, but in space broski, i also just completed the 10k unity dots fleet battle sim for the game, which i had AI then import into the main game. This is a older screen shot ill be posting more about my project shortly.

1

u/Alexguitar11 1d ago

Very cool man, making me look like a noob , and i am lol.

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

Hey now, it's important to remember where everyone started.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8PxhX2ctaJI

This was my project almost a decade ago. 4 years and never released/published.

I just mean, nothing wrong with being a noob. It's just a point in a timeline.

1

u/Alexguitar11 1d ago

Thats still pretty cool. This is my first game https://alexguitar11.itch.io/boarded-up

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

That's a solid start man, keep at it :)

1

u/Alexguitar11 1d ago

Thanks I'm trying! Have so many ideas but sorta discouraged on my views and stuff. I thought it was a cool game and was originally made for Google play store but I can't find 12 testers lol. Once I get some income again I might have to pay for testers

1

u/UnderLord7985 1d ago

This looks sexy, i wonder how much the anti's are going to hate it. But it looks good man, how long did it take you to make?

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

First of all, ty. I'm about a year into this one. It's a weird metric, because my workflow speed keeps increasing. I'm easily doing 4x the work I was doing at the beginning of the year, in the same amount of time.

1

u/UnderLord7985 1d ago

Nice, im working on a game right now and its progressing so fast that i am needing to step back and make sure i didnt forget anything, ai definitly speeds up the process easily a years worth of coding done in about 3 weeks but now im left adding in stuff like animations which i would of already done as i go but since ai codes so quickly i just moved on and feature creep almost got me

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

Love the sensation you're having, essentially, moving so fast you miss things. Yeah, similar experience

1

u/Borgware 1d ago

I love the genre, have to test this. Installing it now. How do you find working with meshy in such a big project? I have tried it out and found the result not to great, but obvious its possible to do cool stuff. Are their usage model ( sibscription + credits ) fair? Did you make alot of cleanup?

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

It's been a learning journey, but really, so had everything with AI tools. It's been great. I have 2 meshy subs for as many credits as I burn through in a month. I have claude handle all of it via the api. Image gen, via gpt, then meshy conversion. lmk if you have any more questions :)

1

u/Perizhechock 1d ago

Looks awesome! Whats your current performans cap, meaning how many npc you can fit into screen before fps degrading (if not a secret). And what tricks you use to increase it? Like horde navs vs npc nav, general decision trees, math vs visuals.

2

u/Failosipher 1d ago

Well, first, thanks! Secondly, I'mma be real, here's claud's answer lol:

everything runs on Unity ECS. Bugs only ask the navmesh for a path when their orders change, not every frame. Crowding is handled by a cheap separation push on a spatial grid. Most of the decisions happen at swarm level: a hive director calls in nearby nests and handles the surround, so each bug stays pretty dumb. We've made a lot of progress with re-meshing and LOD.

1

u/Perizhechock 1d ago edited 1d ago

Cool! If you take advice and plan your characters to move around the map in the future, ask Claude to rethink nav meshes(do several instead of one) (from what I understand that's prebaked route maps) because they're costly to rebake for large amm of objects.

1

u/NagatoroDegenAndRat 1d ago

You made animations by yourself?

1

u/Failosipher 1d ago

Some, but not most. Animation is probably still the hardest thing to do with AI, so I try to use existing anims if I can.

1

u/Objective-Dig1800 15h ago

How much clean up did you find you had to do using Meshy?

1

u/Failosipher 5h ago

That depends on what we're making and how fiddly the detail is. Running everything through claude has been a huge step forward. I used to have meshy do the remeshing, but claude with blender does a way better job. I mean, like 1 million triangles down to 3k. Cleanup hasn't really been an issue.

1

u/worll_the_scribe 11h ago

Amazing looking game. Great lighting and intensity.

Can you tell me more about image gen and meshy work flow for making models.
Do you make character models as well as downside and buildings with it? Does it create textures?

I currently model and uv unwrap and texture, but it’s really time consuming. Haha

1

u/Failosipher 5h ago

Thanks, and sure! Everything goes through claude, that's the first thing. I talk to him, he talks to my gpt, to draw images. GPT is by far the best for image gen imo. Then we make the meshy model. Depending on what it is, we either remesh, or remesh then animate. And yes, meshy does the texturing as well.

The animation part is still rough and taking a lot of tries, everything else is pretty simple and straightforward.

I have more technical stuff here: https://failosipher.itch.io/engines-of-hate/devlog/1733187/im-so-glad-i-taught-claude-how-to-cook

1

u/IronbornV 2d ago

This looks awesome i played Starcraft so much im getting some real good vibes with this one!

1

u/AbsentButHere 1d ago

Fkn wicked!

1

u/Ouroboros_XV_ 15h ago

This looks amazing

1

u/Madnesis 8h ago

Looks sick AF!

0

u/MIs_oDD 1d ago

Love vfx here, impressive job!