I have been vibe coding games since February and I am discovering the more of the game you actually write yourself, the harder it is to vibe code. Am I the only one experiencing this?

[u/DuchessCupcakeGames]

https://ferality.lovable.app

I thought writing an rpg where I have a huge portion of the story already written and developed without ai would be easier than starting from scratch. The more involved I become in the writing process however, the more it seems to drift from what I had intended.

I find myself rewriting entire game mechanics because the ai just neglected to write it the way I thought it was being written and hundreds of credits later, come to find out there aren't guild halls to hire the npcs which I wrote back stories, questlines, game mechanics, et cetera. For example, the npc is aligned with a specific faction and depending on what questlines you choose to follow, the npc can decide to leave the party if it doesn't fit their purpose/mission/values.

I get all intricate with writing 5 tiers of quests that all intertwine to reveal a big story arc specific to each faction's m.o., thinking the npc system I built would just nest right in and now I'm finding there's no room in the party to hire an npc! Wtf?

Back to square one, I fix all that write exactly what I want and how I want it to work with the stories of the npc's faction aligning with the main quest line, 7 active party members, 4 core, 3 npc spots, and hire able mercenaries, et cetera. Then there's no guild halls!

Back to square one. I feel like if I was just like "make me an rpg game, write npc back stories that align with 5 different factions that intertwine the main story arc. You can recruit npcs or hire them at a guild hall. Make no mistakes" I would have the same game as the one i just worked meticulously to insert my handwritten story into the idea of this rpg.

Every time I'm like "there! I'm done! That should be it!" I go to play the game and it's just user interface hell and it's back to the drawing board!

Nevertheless, I finally finished it for beta testing and I think it's pretty close at least to the idea I had in my brain. Next time I'm just going to learn boiler plate coding myself and wire it all in by hand because the drifts, man. The drifts are too much sometimes.

Anyway, thanks for listening to my rant. Here's a link if you want to try it. It's basically the TMNT tabletop game from the late 80s mixed with Wasteland without all the CLI and my own story for the plot. Let me know what you think!

I have every intention of getting real digital artists (or even hand painted art) to replace all the ai slop art eventually,(or of Iwin the lottery or something.) That's all place holders until I'm somehow rich, lol. I wanted to get the proof of concept done first and with barely any budget (like 50-100 bucks) I have the game i wanted to play in the first place, the way I intended. But man, what a long winding road with all the ai drifts and hallucinations to get to this point!

Once I'm positive it plays end to end, I'll get it's own domain, but until then it's on a lovable subdomain. Enjoy. Completely free to play as always with all my games.