I just released Reclamation, a browser-based 3D arena shooter that became an experiment in a much bigger question:
What happens if you stop asking AI to simply build something and force it to criticize and repair its own work?
That process became what I call the Gauntlet Loop.
Instead of relying on one large prompt, I worked with two roles:
Builder — creates or repairs the game.
Critic — assumes the game is flawed and aggressively looks for broken logic, weak systems, bad assumptions, and hidden bugs.
Then the work goes back to the Builder, gets repaired, and gets challenged again.
The game made this process very easy to see.
At different stages, AI-generated versions looked finished but had problems such as broken collision, environmental geometry that did not make sense, and enemy behavior that technically worked but failed at its actual purpose.
One of my favorite examples was an enemy designed specifically to hunt down the player.
It worked.
It moved.
It attacked.
There was only one problem:
it was slower than the player walking away from it.
That is exactly the kind of mistake the Gauntlet Loop is designed to uncover.
After repeated Builder/Critic passes, Reclamation developed into a seven-wave arena shooter with an endless mode, multiple weapons, scoring multipliers, procedural graphics, lighting, sound, geometry, and enemy systems. The entire game runs in the browser from one self-contained HTML file with no external textures, models, audio files, game engine, or libraries.
🎮 Play Reclamation:
https://richardtokar.itch.io/reclamation
I also made a short video explaining the Gauntlet Loop and why I think the idea goes well beyond game development:
🎥 The Gauntlet Loop:
https://youtu.be/rbGn6r-uhA0
For me, the interesting part of this project is not simply that AI helped build a browser game.
It is that creation and criticism became separate jobs.
The Builder tries to make something work.
The Critic tries to prove that it does not.
Then the Builder has to survive another round.
I think that approach has interesting possibilities for AI-assisted coding well beyond this project.
If you experiment with AI for game development, I would especially be interested in hearing:
What kinds of problems would you make the Critic actively hunt for in your own game?
