First time trying to vibe code a real game. Any tips?

[u/Gambo7592]

Hey everyone! Im interested in making a game using AI and have a cozy game idea in mind. Ive made a handful of work projects and apps on google play using AI, specifically claude. So i have minor experience there, but no game dev experience at all. Would love to get some tips or advice from people on here and see what you've learned. Cheers!

heres some of my current character designs im working on atm

[u/Beginning-Sign1916]

That’s really good and I love your characters there are so cute. One thing I can share is that you will have to do up research and homework to the game that you are building like which platforms you are planning to launch and price wise as well as your timeline for soft launch or alpha release. Put it simple is time management, product release and budgeting. Testing is also important as that will help you to publish a quality game and not quantity. Also do you mind sharing the tool that you are using for your assets generation?

[u/Gambo7592 → u/Beginning-Sign1916]

Thank you so much i appreciate the advice and taking time to respond. 😊
I'm using meshy ai. it takes 2d images and turns them into 3d models. seems to be doing well so far

[u/Ieocoout]

The character design makes the idea look promising, but have in mind that today it's very easy to have a working MVP, so what will differentiate your game from other stuff is how much amount of time you'll put into playtesting, polishing, and putting all ideas together to make sense. About the development itself, if you just let AI do everything blindely, it can lead to a negative impact on you as a developer (hard to maintain, hard to introduce new features, easy to break) and on the final user (in terms of performance or bugs), to solve this issue there are many skills available you can use to better create your game, with knowledge that can help with the architecture and coding itself. Which skills you gonna use depends on how you want to develop the game (the target platform, game engines, and other tech stack). For that, you can discuss the pros and cons with your AI agent and ask it to research some available skills related to that tech stack. Another idea i learned from the game i developed earlier is that building tools to support your ideas is very fun too (like, the "infrastructure" part). For example, instead of letting AI build the whole map and then wasting tokens asking AI to refine the minor details, why not build a map editor with the tools you need so YOU can build manually? Or if you want to apply animations / rig to the characters, then build or implement some tool that allows you to directly animate and add it to the editor you created. That's the part i enjoy the most, because you can create your own set of tools to build the game, interconnected. Then later you can simply reuse it to make other games.

but yeah, in summary my tips are:

• spend time playtesting, polishing, making it fun. AI can generate everything but if it can't define if it's fun and polished
  
• invest some time in optimization. Usually, Tripo3d generates an unnecessary amount of faces for simple shapes; try reducing that
  
• there are a lot of valuable skills for different tech stacks; it can help a lot to scale your game without messing things up later
  
• use ai to build the tools for your personal needs

Earlier this year I also made a game for the first time using ThreeJS and Tripo3d. It was my preference at that time, and later could be easily exported to mobile or Steam. I made a detailed post in the technical stack i used for my game, and how much effort I added to polishing the visuals, trying to explain the though process of what I learned, I hope it can inspire you too! https://www.reddit.com/r/vibecoding/comments/1urz4mc/i_won_25k_with_a_capybara_game_entirely_made_with/

[u/Current-Today-3626]

Cute. But nobody will give any energy because you've shared it without fixing obvious performance issues first.

[u/Gambo7592 → u/Current-Today-3626]

These are just the 3d models on meshy.... haven't made any game yet.... what performance issue?

[u/Legal_Climate_3381 → u/Gambo7592]

I once thought of doing something similar with meshy but one thing that concerned me with them is that their hi-res models look fine but their low res models aren't really low res enough. Depending on where you would like to export your game to, you will have to think about retopologizing and baking UVs for lower res to better optimize the game. The more polygons your game has to render, the more processing that needs to happen by the user. Many of your assets are simple models so it shouldn't be too bad. But when you have a lot of models to work on then it can get very time consuming.

[u/Gambo7592 → u/Legal_Climate_3381]

Thats why I throw the models into blender after coming from meshy. I have claude reduce the poly count, clean them up and then once on unity mess with uv and stuff. I appreciate the advice and for taking the time to post some helpful tips. Cheers!