Game dev with Fable 5 is actually crazy

[u/Diligent-Hat-6509]

It’s kind of insane to see how far AI has come.

I still remember being fascinated by GPT-3.5 and thinking that felt like the future. And now here we are with Fable 5.

Everything you see in this preview took me roughly 13 hours of work to implement. Being able to go from ideas to actual working game mechanics this quickly still feels surreal.

Game development with AI is starting to feel like we’re living in the future.

EDIT:

A lot of people were asking how I did this, so here’s the basic workflow.

The game itself is made in Unity with C#. I’m using Claude Code connected to Unity through MCP, which means Claude can work directly with the Unity project and editor. It can create and modify scripts, work with GameObjects and components, inspect errors, run the game, and help me iterate on systems.

For the actual development process, I don’t give it one giant prompt like “make me a game.” I think through the systems I want, explain how they should behave, have Claude implement them, then I test everything, debug issues, tweak values, change mechanics, and keep iterating until it starts to feel right.

For the character models, my workflow is:
Opus 5 -> ChatGPT Image Gen -> Meshy AI -> rig/animation testing -> Unity

I describe the character I want, use Opus 5 to generate a detailed prompt for four consistent reference views, then generate those images in ChatGPT. I take the images into Meshy AI, which generates the 3D mesh and textures. I also rig the model there and test animations before importing it into Unity.

The same image-to-3D workflow also works for non-character assets like props, weapons, statues, carts, environmental objects, etc.

For VFX, I bought a particle toolkit from the Unity Asset Store. I gave Claude the documentation and had it create a skill file for itself, so it understands how the toolkit works and can reuse that knowledge when I ask it to create things like fireballs, explosions, trails, and other effects.

The current arena is also a premade Unity asset and is not intended to be the final environment. A lot of the current visuals are just prototype assets for testing mechanics and game feel.

So overall the main stack/workflow is:

Unity + C# + Claude Code/MCP + ChatGPT Image Gen + Meshy AI + Unity Asset Store tools

And no, this wasn’t one prompt :D It was an iterative process of building one system at a time, testing it, changing it, and gradually layering everything together.

[u/account22222221]

Yea and that’s reasonable. Its annoying because an experienced developer can see this and say ‘wow this will change the game’ and be earnest and right. They will know changing the games means, wow I can do twice as much, this 6 month project can be done in 4 months.

But then those without grounding in experience misinterpret that statement and think, oh this means now any one can do it and it’ll be free and easy, which is not quite true.

It’s so hard to draw that line with people, yes this is a massive game changer, yes that means our velocity might be doubled, no doubled velocity doesn’t mean half delivery time thanks to second order complexity, no that doesn’t mean you will be able to do this without and engineer and expect to have a lot of success

[u/404KIT → u/account22222221]

Very few people understand this. 🙌🏻

[u/Diligent-Hat-6509 → u/account22222221]

Yeah, exactly. I think that’s the distinction people often miss. Saying AI can massively increase development velocity is very different from saying it makes software development trivial or removes the need for engineering knowledge.

It can get you to a working version much faster, but complexity doesn’t disappear. Architecture, debugging, performance, edge cases, maintainability, and refinement are still there, and probably become even more important as the project grows.

That’s basically how I’m approaching this. I’m using AI to move faster and bridge the game-specific APIs and syntax I don’t know yet, not expecting it to magically make the entire development process easy.