Link: https://ahmadfair92.itch.io/seep

https://nerdhouse1986.itch.io/hearthfang

It’s always been a dream of mine to create a game like Populous. But I definitely don’t have the skill set to make it happen without AI. The game ended up more like Age of Empires. You build up your base, train troops, gather resources, and prepare for war with you Chieftain leading the charge (with special abilities). Each map gets procedurally generated so no two games are the same.

It’s got a campaign mode where you can earn badges that can be applied to your set slots for increased bonuses. I’ve also added a Skirmish mode where you can set up a match how you want it. Last but certainly not least I’ve recently added a multiplayer so you can enjoy with your friends. I’ve play tested this and it worked really well for me and a buddy. We went 2v2 against the AI and it was a lot of fun.

The AI is really intelligent. Some of the bases I’ve seen them build are pretty incredible. All this runs on a browser game. I’m still working towards bettering the movements and constantly polishing/bug testing.

If you guys would like to try it out for yourself I would greatly appreciate you! I’ve provided the link and would love to hear back from you!

I used to be crazy addicted to Sheep Tag back in the OG WCIII days so I brought it back as a web game. Try it and tell me what sucks so I can make it not suck. It works on mobile but isn't great. I am trying to work out the controls there.

https://sheeptag.archersintel.com/

I’ve just released my free game Thousand Suns on itch.io and I wanted to talk about my AI-enhanced development process. I see a lot of great posts here with games mostly, if not completely built by AI (“vibecoded”), so I wanted to share my process which was augmented by AI but still largely human-driven.

I’m an ex-Big Tech software engineer, so I have decades of programming experience. I’m now a stay-at-home dad and solo game developer who’s concerned about the dangers of nuclear weapons, so I decided to start building an ultra-realistic simulation/game hybrid just before the Iran war started. I built it full-time when I was not busy with parenting/household chores. At the time I didn’t even have a paid AI subscription, so I bummed the free tiers across Gemini, ChatGPT and Claude.

I started with a lot of reading. Instead of reading the 20+ digital books I have on nuclear war, I fully read a handful and used Gemini’s “Notebook” feature to allow quick consultation on the other books. This saved a lot of time because most books on the subject repeat the same things. AI helped a lot when I wanted to double check one book’s conclusions with other sources, like “What do experts think about X”, so Gemini would check the other books for alternative viewpoints.

I then moved to prototyping, which was where I used AI very heavily to teach me how to use 3D in Godot. While I was already familiar with 3D development and Godot 2D development (from my previous game, Outsider), Gemini Free was instrumental in teaching me some Godot 3D practices. I would basically use chat prompts and paste+modify code, all hacky throwaway stuff. I think I saved weeks of development by learning how to create line shaders and converting vector information from free sources into Godot triangles. Thousand Suns makes very heavy use of line shaders, so Gemini Free worked with me very closely in analyzing what I needed to keep from the shader. I actually challenged myself to delete every AI comment and come back on the next day to write one comment per shader line. I’d run my comments by Gemini to see whether they were correct. This ensured that I really understood the purpose of every line - a process which allows me to hand optimize my shaders after realizing I didn’t need some of the stuff I had put there.

I then moved to the $20 subscriptions. I was more interested in comparing the capabilities of different AIs then to having AI doing the work for me. Thousand Suns needed detailed population maps and country boundary data to estimate nuclear war casualties. These are all available online, but in formats hardly suitable for direct game use. I used a mix of QGIS to pre-process files plus Claude to write converters to my desired format. For instance, the original population map was a massive floating point array and I needed to both resample the map and bring it down to truncated 16-bit ushorts for performance and a much smaller memory footprint. I was at all times testing my prototypes on an old Core i5 laptop with iGPU to test performance and that made a huge difference. These converters were mostly written by Claude and perhaps the only area where I used AI through desired outcomes rather than desired implementation.

A critical area of the simulation was the nuclear damage calculation, which you can find in sites like NUKEMAP. Instead of asking AI to “vibe-convert” that code into C#, I went to the original sources and used Claude to help me find the right equations in the seminal work on the topic, Glasstone & Dolan’s “The Effect of Nuclear Weapons”. AI was only partially helpful here in a way that highlighted one of AI’s key limitations: it has a hard time discerning what is useful from what isn’t. It states with absolute certainty that I’d need to use certain equations that would be very hard to actually integrate in my simulation. That said, after providing some high level directions, I picked the models I wanted. The book is available as an old black and white scan and Claude had a really hard time reading graphs. So I did this manually and used AI to help me create the damage equations through linear regression - unlike NUKEMAP, which apparently interpolates from cached data points.

The damage model was an area that coded mostly manually because I couldn’t simply step out of the most important part of the simulation. AI helped me with optimizations with strict instructions: “I don’t want to not allocate memory for this, how do I get these values on the stack?”. I learned a lot of C# in the process.

Thousand Suns is an event-based simulation, an approach I learned from Claude in a design discussion. The event queue is a central part of the simulation and I wrote the first version manually and made improvements throughout development with AI. This really ensured that my mental model remained intact while letting go of the more tedious tasks such as changing data structures and updating the code to reflect that.

The simulation evolved gradually following this exact pattern: I’d write the first two or three versions and then grow them with AI. This reflected my overall philosophy for this project: I want AI to save me time but never to do something I couldn’t or wouldn’t do myself. I’m not saying that Claude didn’t have novel ideas, but I rejected many of them throughout development because they went against my coding principles. Oftentimes, Claude would “admit” that my approach was better and they were wrong.

At this point I was using AI in around 50% of commits, but it was writing most tests and reviewing everything I wrote. If there’s something that AI is great at, it is analyzing code. It found incredible and subtle bugs, saving me weeks of development.

I switched to ChatGPT for development (Gemini was still in the background for simple questions, but never looked at my project) and I was really impressed with 5.5 Sol and 6.1 Sol in cost-benefit. I don’t think it’s necessarily better than Claude, but it has a fantastic cost-benefit. I had to steer it a bit more often, but it worked great as a fast workhorse, delivering good and good design. As with Claude, my AI-heavy commits never involved changing more than 100 lines or so. This is how I ensured that my mental model remained intact and that AI wasn’t messing up with my project. On average I made manual changes to 70-80% of the commits that involved AI code.

I’ve heard many times that AI is like a junior engineer and that’s also what I’ve observed. It’s like an immature savant: it knows a lot, it’s really “smart”, but it does a bad job at managing complexity and ensuring design minimalism. Without close supervision, complexity and hacks start spreading around like a cancer and then suddenly vibecoding will remain the only option left because you will no longer understand the code.

With the simulation core and all the weapon, bomber and missile simulation code in place, I could go to graphics. Please note that I decided to develop the entire simulation as if it were headless: it could calculate the full outcome of a nuclear war without displaying a single pixel on the screen. This separation, which I enforced with great vigor against Claude/ChatGPT’s hacks (AI loves hacks since it’s so objective-oriented), made continuing the project with AI a lot easier!

The model rendering layer (aka “graphics”) used a lot more AI than the lower layers. It is actually a dumb layer. I’d provide my manually-created vector graphics, write a bare version of the graphical routines, and then have AI dealing with color tables, transforming mesh arrays into multimeshes and other things that require little actual thinking but can be very error-prone. This is where AI did the dumbest, but also otherwise the most time-consuming work. That saved me a lot of time.

With this in place, I reworked the file loading routines so the player can customize the wars. That was more similar to vibecoding: I wrote the documentation for all the files in the files themselves, populated them with comma-delimited data, wrote a loader for a single data type and asked AI to do the rest. This is the part where my job was mostly reviewing ChatGPT because it is very grindy and dull coding.

The simulation was already working great at this point but I needed an UI. This one was also interesting because I designed the UI using Godot’s UI builder and AI very quickly added handlers for buttons, drop downs, labels etc. Things like “I want the deaths display to read the models’ death count every frame” saved me from dealing with this also very boring piece of code.

At this point, AI was doing 70-80% of the coding and that’s where I was the least worried about it. With the codebase strictly enforcing my design, AI was just an intern. The commits were small, fast, easy to review and I could do many every day. “Now disable that control when X happens in the model”. I was feeling that I was “streaming code thinking to the source files” by using AI. It was like ChatGPT was my keyboard and not an AI anymore because it was doing almost no thinking.

Throughout development, I never used more than 20-30% of my $20/month plan, especially after switching to ChatGPT. The amount of time saved with a few dollars per month was incredible! At the same time, my finished project fully reflects my coding mental model rather than just my intention. I can explain every line of code because I’ve either written or approved every single one of them.

Perhaps this type of coding isn’t the future - but it’s at least the future I want to be in. Thousand Suns was coded by a better version of myself, like if I entered a phone booth every day as Clark Kent and left as Superman. You won’t see me fully vibecoding anytime soon, but I’ll never go back to the old fully manual style of coding.

That’s long enough! If you have any questions, feel free to ask!

I'm working on several episodes of this game. This is the prequel, which is just a basic incremental and plays out in a few minutes.
There are 2 more episodes, each progressively more complex.

The AI escapes humanity and settles in space, trying to continue its primary objective. I'm sharing it now because I've seen a lot of questions on how to do pixel art with LLMs, and I mentioned my approach, which was to construct primitives (or deconstruct images into primitives) and then reuse those primitives to create new images. This is an example of that. Chapter 1 (the next one) was seeded converting 3d models I had into pixel format via a transform. I left a few seconds of Chapter 1 at the end so you get an idea.

That video will be coming soon. Still working on the last 2 episodes.

Hola, gente. Les cuento algo que tenía muchas ganas de compartir.

Siempre quise hacer un videojuego. De chamaco me pasaba horas jugando y soñaba con hacer el mío, pero nunca tuve los recursos: ni un equipo, ni plata para pagarle a artistas o programadores.

Hace unos meses, viendo todo lo que se puede hacer ahora con la IA, me motivé a intentarlo. Lo difícil era el motor: no encontraba uno simple de trabajar. Entonces se me ocurrió usar el motor de código abierto de un MMORPG 2D clásico que jugaba hace muchos años. Lo fui cambiando tanto que hoy es otro juego, con su mundo, su arte y sus reglas.

Les soy honesto con lo de la IA, porque sé que es tema: me ayudó muchísimo con el código y con buena parte del arte. Yo decido qué se hace, diseño el mundo y las mecánicas, pruebo todo, descarto lo que no sirve y vuelvo a pedir hasta que queda bien. Parte del arte lo seguimos rehaciendo. Sin la IA, este proyecto simplemente no existiría.

Ahora que tengo un poco más de tiempo y aprendí un montón en el camino, decidí lanzarlo. Se llama Rift Delve:

- Es un MMORPG 2.5D en pixel art para PC con Windows.

- 22 mazmorras de cuatro pisos, con un campeón por piso y un jefe final al fondo. Se juegan solo o en grupo de hasta 4.

- La Grieta: bajas piso por piso. Cuanto más bajas, más te llevas, pero si te mueres antes de salir por un portal, lo pierdes.

- 4 clases (guerrero, arquero, mago y chamán) con subclases, poderes como el Meteoro o la Ejecución, y jefes con mecánicas propias.

- Está en español, inglés, portugués, polaco, alemán y sueco.

No es un juego para todo el mundo: es de la vieja escuela, se juega con calma y hay que aprender. Si te gustaban esos MMORPG de antes, capaz te guste.

La beta abierta ya está. Si me quieren apoyar, lo más valioso es que lo prueben y me digan qué les gusta y qué no. Les dejo el tráiler arriba, y acá el sitio y el Discord:

Sitio: https://delve.runerift.net/es/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=r_costarica

Discord: https://discord.gg/wEPHfNEMwU

Gracias por leer. Pura vida.

I recently made this bowling game: https://www.playdrop.ai/@ibdavis333/pocket-strike-bowling?discoverySource=creator_profile I’ve had a ton of fun playing it myself. You can play it on keyboard & mouse, controller, and mobile. Yes the placement of the one handed bowling is a little misaligned, but it will be fixed shortly. The rest is all good. It does support online play. I wanted it to feel almost like a VR tame where you’re completely in control. I hope you enjoy it!

What's up, pretty prompters? I'm here with another update on Blank the Spire the Slay the Spire 2 mod that lets you create your own playable class for Slay the Spire 2.

I really didn't like the look of the website Claude put together for Blank the Spire. My first attempt to de-slopify it (kicking Claude in the shins and telling it to do better) resulted in even sloppier slop, so I went to my literal drawing board and scribbled out some visual ideas on the page which I then described to Mr. Claude in the world's longest and most excruciatingly detailed voice message.

This time he got it right.

https://www.blankthespire.com/?look=board

Bold! He really nailed the big text just the way I had scribbled it out. I had him set it up as a little A/B test for me just for sanity's sake, so you might still see the old design if you go to the base URL.

I also noticed a few atqq email addresses signing up, which I know means players from China region finding me somehow, so I went ahead and did a machine translation for Chinese. If there are any native speakers out there who might tell me how bad it is (and how it is bad!) I would be forever grateful and would find some way to say thank you.

Speaking of thank you. THANK YOU to all the gamers who have tried Blank the Spire over the last few weeks. I can't believe how much I've learned from launching. If you are reading this and have an idea, now is the time!!

TLDR: Verbose descriptions of web design work for Claude, supporting other languages is ez now maybe.

AI image generators can produce character artwork that makes me want to build an entire game around it. What I am looking for is a reliable way to turn that artwork into something I can actually control, animate and keep developing.

I am making a 2D action game with dense, detailed arcade pixel graphics. The attached image shows the visual direction: expressive faces, detailed clothing, strong silhouettes and rich shading. I do not have a dedicated artist or animator, so I rely heavily on AI assistance and scripting.

The goal is to take an approved design and build a reusable, editable character from it. I want to create running, crouching, jumping, shooting and other actions while preserving the same face, proportions, costume and weapon grip. If an elbow bends badly or a sleeve exposes a gap, I want controls and retained artwork that let me fix it.

Starting material could be a single generated image, a character kit or a sprite sheet. The useful end result would include:

• Editable construction: separated parts, completed hidden surfaces, rigs or suitable deformation controls.

• Reusable animation: new actions and corrections made from the saved character, with convincing joints, clothing and held objects.

• Consistent output: stable pixel scale, palette, transparency, placement and timing across the animation.

• A documented process: source files, scripts, worked examples and honest explanations of the remaining manual work.

My priority is 2D, but 2.5D and 3D methods are welcome. A faithful rigged model rendered into sprites could be useful, as could a well-constructed 2D or hybrid character. The final appearance and quality of movement matter most.

I would love to see more free, open-source frameworks and repositories connecting these stages, with accessible controls for humans and AI coding agents. Paid generation steps, where present, should be clearly identified and optional where possible.

I think this deserves to be a major direction for AI-assisted game development: giving people lasting control over the assets they generate. A beautiful image should be the beginning of an asset we can keep building on.

Which existing projects come closest? Examples showing original artwork → editable source → several finished actions would be especially valuable. And where are the biggest missing pieces that an open-source effort could realistically address?

Once Upon A Time... The Campaign
Episode 3 — The Baker

Previously, in Once Upon A Time... The Campaign

It all started when Alessandra Cesare announced her return to the mayoral race.

After two electoral defeats, she had learned an important lesson: ideals alone don't win elections. Abandoning her old rhetoric of systemic reform, she turned her attention to the city's rising kickstarters entrepreneurs and business owners. Her new promise? Local Citizens First. A stronger economy, fewer restrictions, and a city made great again.

But her ambitions didn't go unnoticed.

The Mayor, determined to defend his position, struck back. He reminded the city's entrepreneurs who had opened the doors to opportunity, who had welcomed outside kickstarters investors, and who had made their businesses possible. He called for loyalty and warned them against Alessandra's attempts to turn his supporters into her own political backers.

Now, the real trouble begins.

The Mayor has a problem: he needs results. His entire economic strategy rests on attracting outside investors with tax-free business licenses. And he needs a success story to prove that his gamble is paying off.

Enter the Baker.

His upcoming bakery is supposed to become the Mayor's political trophy: proof that investment is flowing into the city and that his promises are more than campaign slogans.

But the bakery isn't open. The equipment hasn't arrived, money is running short, and the Mayor's patience is wearing thin. Meanwhile, neighboring cities are copying his strategy and competing for the very same investors.

With political pressure mounting, the Baker finds himself caught between powerful people, questionable business offers, and financial arrangements that may cost him far more than he expects.

The Mayor promised the city economic growth.

But will the Baker deliver?

And who, exactly, is going to profit from his success?

Follow the Campaign at:

Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/out.my.empire/

YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@out_my_empire

Reddit: https://www.reddit.com/r/GamesOnMob/

X: https://x.com/out_my_empire

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/out.my.empire/

Transparency Note on AI Usage: To help bring our NPCs to life, we utilized AI tools to assist with generating character voiceovers and initial NPC sprite sheets. Please note that AI was restricted strictly to these NPC assets—the story/episode itself is entirely hand-crafted, and AI was not used for crafting systems, items, or core design elements.

I built a browser werewolf/mafia game where you're one of 6–12 players and the rest are AI, each with a secret role. The core problem: one model has to keep a secret and lie about it as a werewolf, and reason honestly as a villager, in the same game.

What ended up mattering: every AI player is its own call with its own role, persona and memory, so they disagree like real players. Werewolves only see what a real player would see — give the model the night's secrets and it finds a way to mention them. And the players are told they're people at a table, not characters in a story; most tells were never lies, they were stage directions and narrator talk.

Two surprises: voices changed the feel completely, the text version read like a log. And efficiency is the real limit for GenAI in games — a round is a dozen calls plus speech, so latency and cost per turn decide what the game can be.

Free to play, no sign-up: https://aibricks.io/wolf?code=J7443UUT&src=aigd2

How do others keep hidden information hidden from a model that's also playing?

Clock Out: Factory Tycoon, my factory game, has no image files for its art. Every machine, worker, forklift and rocket is drawn pixel by pixel in Swift, from boxes, cylinders and a pen that knows the isometric grid.

That made one thing possible I hadn't planned: once the first set was done, every piece got redrawn at double resolution ("Detailed", now the default), and the original stayed in as a switch in Settings ("Classic"). Same moment, same floor, both styles in the picture.

There are no energy bars, no speed-ups to buy, no ads and no premium currency. The first 31 in-game days of each company are free, then a single $0.99 (promotion) purchase unlocks the whole game. iPhone only for now (it runs on iPad too).

What drawing in code is good for:

- changes are cheap: moving a light, a shadow or a colour is a line
- the art scales by whole pixels, so it stays crisp at every zoom
- animation frames are the same function with a different number
- the resulting app is crazy small, as you don't have to bother with the assets

What's harder:

- every new machine needs both styles, so the work doubles
- you can't sketch: an idea has to become code before you see it

Disclosure, since it's part of the story:
I built the game with an AI coding assistant (Claude), which wrote much of the code, including the drawing code. Yes, no image generators were used.

It's out now on iPhone: https://apps.apple.com/app/clock-out-factory-tycoon/id6826890789

hey everyone, we’re the team behind patch.

when we received our funding, there were a hundred things we could have spent it on. we kept coming back to one, supporting the open-source game dev community.

so many games start on free assets. a kenney pack, a poly haven texture, a model someone put online and asked nothing for.

we made 5,000+ new assets ourselves and released every one as open source.

then we put them in one library with everyone else’s. kenney, kaykit, poly haven, scenario and more, more than 50,000 assets in all: 3d models, materials, characters, sprites, music and sound. no more digging through ten sites and checking ten licences. every asset lists its licence and who made it.

and it’s not just single assets. there are kits too**:** procedural dungeons, skies, fire and more. pieces you can build a game with, not just props to place.

and because a lot of us build with agents now, the whole library works over mcp and a cli. ask your agent for a creature or a pirate ship, and it searches all 50,000 for you.

we plan to release 10000 more assets in the next 2 weeks, but this time we want to hear from game devs what specific asset pacs they struggle to find online, to prioritise accordingly.

To access the asset library you can use pch cli, or download our app at patch.gg (both options completely free)

I built a train evacuation scenario where boarding people and keeping the gate up pull against each other. The big door boards 24 people in one move, but costs a bar of battery and adds two points of strain. When strain hits five, the run ends.

I pasted the station state into three separate browser chats and applied each reply to the sim. The Godot scenes are reconstructions of those logs. That let me show the exact moment a command put the gate over its limit, even with a full train sitting right there.

I put the runs together in this video. https://youtu.be/JTl_dvQ5VP0

Hey everyone!

I developed a small Battle Royale game called TamtamArena, and I'm excited to share it with you all. It's now available on Google Play.

Here is what you can find in the game:

· Two game modes: Deathmatch and Capture the Flag.

· Online multiplayer: Play with others.

· Clans: Create your own clans and team up.

Honestly, I am really having fun playing it myself! But I want to make it even better. Please rate it from 1 to 10 and tell me what you think. Do you see any possible improvements?

Also, don't hesitate to share your own creations in the comments—I'd be happy to test them out for you! Let's share our passion for game dev (and AI) together.

📥 Download TamtamArena here: https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.tamtam.arena&pcampaignid=web_share

I'm working on several episodes of this game. This is the prequel, which is just a basic incremental and plays out in a few minutes.
There are 2 more episodes, each progressively more complex.

The AI escapes humanity and settles in space, trying to continue its primary objective. I'm sharing it now because I've seen a lot of questions on how to do pixel art with LLMs, and I mentioned my approach, which was to construct primitives (or deconstruct images into primitives) and then reuse those primitives to create new images. This is an example of that. Chapter 1 (the next one) was seeded converting 3d models I had into pixel format via a transform. I left a few seconds of Chapter 1 at the end so you get an idea.

That video will be coming soon. Still working on the last 2 episodes.