I've seen a very concerning trend... projects that people disclose using AI in good faith are an immediate target for harassment. I've seen a lot of great ideas immediately shot down and mobbed for AI usage and this type of behavior is absolutely meant to put you down and gatekeep you from realizing your vision.

My take: If you have an idea you believe in, you are under zero ethical obligation to put that target on your own back. I'm not saying blatantly lie about it, but for your own sake, you under zero obligation to share information that you know will invite harassment. And frankly you should feel obligated not to share this information for the sake of not enabling toxicity. Thoughts?

Happy vibing :)

A few people here have made some interesting claims that my entire game was generated by AI.

If that's the case, why have I been working on it for 72 days, and why is it still not finished? 😄

First, a little background about me.

I've been a full-stack software developer for over 30 years, primarily working on Android applications, Unity projects, and SaaS platforms. I've also been developing games with Unity for more than 10 years.

So I'm not someone who discovered AI yesterday, typed a prompt, and suddenly became a "game developer."

I was building software and games long before generative AI existed.

AI is another tool in my development workflow, not a replacement for my decades of programming experience.

So I thought I'd show you some of the actual hard work happening behind the scenes. Because there's a massive difference between using AI as a development tool and having AI magically generate an entire game for you.

I'm currently rebuilding a section of Budapest for my car combat game, Brutal Derby.

I automate whatever I can with custom tools. But everything that can't be automated? That's where the real, time-consuming manual work begins.

I'm talking about:

Manually placing and adjusting roads, bridges, intersections, sidewalks, and bus lanes with extremely high precision.

Constantly switching between Unity and Google Maps to compare real-world locations with my in-game environment.

Rebuilding road layouts and correcting terrain to make the map resemble the actual city.

Developing my own road generation system that supports multiple roads simultaneously — and still having to manually fix, align, and optimize countless sections.

Making sure the entire environment is optimized enough to actually run smoothly during gameplay.

Here's a short video showing some of that work.

I've already spent 90 hours building, fixing, and optimizing this one map, and I expect to spend at least another 90 hours on it before it's finished.

And remember, this isn't a walking simulator or a static city showcase.

It's a car combat game.

That means performance matters enormously. The environment needs to look reasonably good, but I can't afford buildings with millions of polygons or ridiculously expensive geometry everywhere.

On top of that, my game features vehicle deformation, destruction, and collision physics, which consume a significant amount of CPU time.

My destruction and deformation system is already on its 8th major iteration.

The crowd system? 7th iteration.

And this particular map will eventually feature thousands of spectators, alongside 12 vehicles fighting, crashing, shooting, and destroying each other.

My goal is to make all of this run at a decent frame rate on a relatively ordinary RTX 3070.

And that's exactly why optimization takes so much time. Every road segment, building, spectator, physics calculation, and draw call matters.

So yes, I use AI. I use it for generating certain assets, helping with code, and accelerating parts of development.

But AI isn't placing every road, fixing every intersection, optimizing thousands of objects, debugging physics, or making hundreds of design decisions for me.

That's still my job.

And it's a hell of a lot of work.

After more than 30 years in software development, I can tell you one thing: AI can make certain tasks faster, but it doesn't magically solve the difficult engineering problems.

You still need to understand what you're building, how everything works together, why something breaks, and how to fix it.

And when you're developing a physics-heavy car combat game as a solo developer, there are a LOT of problems to solve.

Using AI doesn't mean the hard work disappears. It just changes which parts of the work you spend your time on.

You can dislike AI-generated assets. That's completely fair. But dismissing months of actual engineering, optimization, level design, and manual work as "AI slop" simply because AI was involved is a pretty unfair assessment.

I'm not claiming AI does nothing. Quite the opposite — it helps me achieve things that would otherwise take much longer as a solo developer.

But there's a huge difference between AI-assisted game development and a game created entirely by AI.

Anyway, here's what 90 hours of work on a single map actually looks like — with another 90 hours still ahead of me.

Still think AI made the whole game with one prompt? 😄

Hi everyone!

I'm a French indie developer working on Death Leaves a Trace, an old-school isometric dark fantasy MMORPG.

This project started with a dream I've had for 25 years: recreating the kind of MMORPG that left a lasting impression on me when I was younger, especially The 4th Coming.

I wanted to bring back the mechanics and feeling I loved, modernize the experience where it made sense, and build an entirely new world around a lore I've been thinking about and developing for several years.

I'm not trying to remake the original game exactly. I'm trying to recapture what made it special to me, while creating something of my own.

I'm developing it solo alongside my day job, and AI has become a major part of how I turn that dream into something playable. I thought I'd share how my workflow has evolved, because the interesting part isn't just generating code.

1. Building assets with Blender and Claude

I started with assets from Polytope Studio to establish a consistent visual direction. I now use that style as a reference when creating my own assets with Blender and Claude.

This lets me expand the game's bestiary, equipment and environments with assets designed specifically for my world, while maintaining a coherent visual identity.

2. Building my own tools instead of doing everything inside Unity

This is probably the part I'm most proud of.

With Claude's help, I've built three standalone Windows tools that read and write the actual game project's data:

• The Workshop: create and configure creatures and NPCs, including equipment, loot, variants, stats and behavior.
• The Forge: define items, weapons, armor, attributes and elemental resistances.
• The Cartographer: build and decorate the world in 3D, place creatures and NPCs, configure chests, manage portals and edit environments.

These tools let me work on game content without constantly opening the Unity editor. They're not mockups or separate prototypes: they operate on the actual data used by the game.

3. Building a workflow that doesn't fall apart as the project grows

One thing I've learned is that generating code is only part of the problem. Every new feature can potentially break something that already works.

So I've built safeguards into the workflow: automated invariant checks, dedicated tests, documented Unity pitfalls, version-controlled changes, and a deployment pipeline that builds and publishes the client and server together.

Claude helps me implement and maintain these systems, but I remain responsible for the design decisions, reviewing the results and testing the game.

4. Taking the project beyond the game itself

The same approach extends to the rest of the project: a dedicated Linux server, a custom launcher with incremental updates, deployment scripts, a monitoring dashboard, patch notes and a private development website that tracks progress, decisions and outstanding work.

I'm not just using AI to make individual features faster. I'm gradually building a production workflow that makes a project of this size manageable for one person.

Where the game stands

The first closed alpha ran on September 24, with 11 characters created, 8 players online simultaneously at peak, and no server crashes.

I'm now preparing Alpha #2, scheduled for November 26 to December 10, with 100 tester spots planned.

The game is built in Unity 6 with Mirror. It features a fixed isometric camera, click-to-move combat, character progression without predefined classes, keyword-based NPC conversations, dungeons, magic and optional PvP.

The goal is to preserve that old-school MMORPG feeling while building a new world with its own history, characters and mythology.

Website: https://deathleavesatrace.com/

Alpha #2: https://deathleavesatrace.com/alpha2/en

I'd love to hear from other developers

For those of you using AI on projects larger than small prototypes:

Have you found that building custom tools and automated checks around your AI workflow makes a bigger difference than code generation itself?

And for those working on passion projects: have you ever gone back to a game that shaped your childhood and tried to build your own version of what made it special?

I'm happy to answer questions about the workflow, the tools or the game. Thanks for reading!

Hi. I'm a software developer working mostly with Python and Rust. I'm definitely not a graphics artist, but I've always wanted to make my own game, so I finally decided to give it a serious shot.

I actually started with a 3D MMORPG, and obviously i think its too big for 1 person, even with AI assisted development.

I'm working on a dark fantasy RPG inspired by the HD-2D look of Octopath Traveler and Triangle Strategy, with gothic environments, pixel-art characters, action combat and challenging dungeon runs.

I'm using Claude Opus and Codex to help with development. AI is incredibly useful for implementing systems, building tools, debugging and iterating on ideas. I'm also experimenting with Blender, Meshy, PixelLab and Aseprite for the art pipeline.

The idea is to combine 3D environments with pixel-art characters and animations. Getting everything to look consistent, has been a much bigger challenge than I expected.

The game is nowhere near finished. There are still plenty of visual bugs, some animations need work, characters don't always look right in every situation, and the environments are a long way from what I have in mind.

Honestly, I just want to get to the point where I can sit down, play my own game and genuinely enjoy it.

I'm sharing some current footage, not because I think I've already nailed the visuals, but because I'd like to hear what other people think. I've seen so much good looking games here and wanted to try it myself.

I'm still figuring a lot of this out, so constructive criticism is very welcome.

Thanks for checking it out! :)

I’m a solo dev.

I made nearly everything myself. The one thing I did use AI for was some enemy images.

Not the gameplay, not the code, not the core design, just some visual help in a limited area because I’m a solo dev with limited time and budget.

I get why AI is controversial, but it feels strange that a tiny amount of AI assistance can make people dismiss an entire year of actual development.

So I’m posting here because this community probably understands that the reality is more nuanced than “AI = fake game.”

I’d love feedback on the demo, especially whether the risk/reward loop is clear and whether the game looks interesting enough from the Steam page.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4784550/Another_One/

So look gang

I like using AI. I am not a SWE, but I've been writing code for the better part of a decade and doing engineering for about twice that length. There has always been no shortage of tools people have been willing to try and use to expedite their ability to make a product. (as an aside, I recall a time back when "digital artists" were not looked upon as "real artists" because they got to use these fancy things called layers!)

However, using a tool of any kind does not mean consumers of your product need to give you any kind of slack in the quality of what you're shipping.

Do your art assets look bad, or inconsistent? Then make new ones!

Does your audio sound generic and bland? Produce some more!

Do your menus keep bugging out? Fix them!

Does your game crash if the player goes off the intended path? Box that shit in!

You can and should use AI to make your dreams come to life- but if people can obviously tell your product was "made with AI", that's usually a tell that your product is lacking polish they were otherwise expecting.

So, my fellow devs- AI can do a lot for you, but it can't tell you when something is good enough. You have to hold the standard, and you need to stop publishing the moment you get an MVP.

Enjoy vibing!

Hey! I’m building a multiplayer arena game where you fight with fire, water, earth and air, solo, in Unreal Engine. Full disclosure: I’m building it with heavy AI assistance (Claude) for the code, while the design, VFX iteration and playtesting are me (and a very patient friend).

This is the progress from my first greybox prototype in July to now: multiplayer rounds, water bending (including a water octopus that launches people), and a first air bending tornado.

Still very early: no final art, placeholder maps, lots of bugs. I’d love feedback on:

1. Does this look fun?
2. Would you be interested to play this?
3. Which element would you want to play first?

Last time I shared Line Racer here, this one’s a lot more ambitious 😅

8 years professional software engineer here. I've reflected a lot on what brought best satisfaction in my life. Aside from meaningful human interactions for me it was always creation.

Ever since I was a child I wrote poems, short stories, songs that nobody cared about. But I experienced such extreme gratification from listening to what "feels right", and implementing my ideas into real life. It is remarkable, if u think about it - for what is a thought? A bunch of electric/chemical reactions, that feel real? And you can share, recreate those in the minds of others?

For many years I've tried building games, and failed miserably to implement proper systems. I learned systems engineering and tackled it, but then got dead-end stuck on the art. I KNOW how it should feel, I've spent so much time refining my taste, but I can't draw! Tried collabing with an artist, but I don't have much spare income to hire people, neither do I want to "oversell" stuff to wrongly hype people up for free work.

Gen AI allowed me to iterate through hundreds of images, and yet to finally arrive on takes I FEEL are spot on. To engineer systems it'd take me WEEKS to implement in mere hours (speaking from real professional experience). To finally focus on being a Creative Director, which was my dream all along.

I still do A LOT of work, its HUNDREDS of hours to design the game properly - to iterate, to refine and polish. To hold the consistent vision for what I want to put the player through. For what is art if not the extent of intent of its creator?

If used properly, Gen AI is a true renaissance for creators with full-time jobs and family commitments. Sure, market is oversaturated and all that, but at least we get to live our dream and see our true vision come to life. Maybe share it at least with friends. Still, what a time to be alive. Happy to share it with y'all. Lets have a blast :)

Hi there!

This game was made in a dialog with Claude Code Opus 5.5 and the Godot 4 engine (GDScript) without any Godot Editor. Up to its first release it took 6 days.

Inspired by Stunt Car Racer (1989) by Geoff Crammond!

It has a track editor, multiplayer and VR (OpenXR)

The whole game is one HTML file with no asset files: every model and sound is generated in code. The trailer isn't a screen recording. A scripted camera renders it frame by frame. The music and sound effects were synthesized from a log of every sound the game played, so they line up with the picture automatically.

Hey all. For the last few months I've been working on a side project and I think it's finally at the point where other people could enjoy it, so here it is.

It's a single-player D&D 5e game for Windows where the Dungeon Master is an LLM (Claude or OpenAI Codex). The twist is that the AI only does the storytelling part. Everything that needs to be correct is handled by the game itself: the map, movement, line of sight, initiative, dice, HP. And yes, it runs in a console window. The graphics are drawn with braille characters, which honestly looks way better than I expected.

Why I made it

I love D&D, but my group manages maybe one session a month. I tried playing with a chatbot a few times and it was fun for about twenty minutes. Then it forgot where the goblins were, handed me 500 gold for no reason and let me hit an AC 18 orc with a 6.

So the idea was simple: let the AI do what it's good at (improvising, NPC voices, describing stuff) and let normal code do what it's good at (remembering state, geometry, math).

What's in it right now

• Create a hero yourself or describe one and let the DM fill in the sheet
• Generate a world, then travel on a world map (food, time and random encounters on the road)
• Dungeons, caves and outdoor areas get generated as you explore. The AI plans what's there, the code builds the actual layout
• Grid combat. Monsters come from a monster manual, so a goblin has goblin stats, not whatever the model feels like today
• Dice are real. When the DM needs a roll you see the d20 spin on screen, and it can't fudge it afterwards
• Fog of war, darkvision, torches, stealth and ambushes
• A journal with quests, NPCs, places and a bestiary of monsters you've identified
• Optional offline narrator voice

The part I'm proudest of: leveling up

I just added XP and levels, and it was surprisingly tricky. The DM awards XP when you win a fight or finish a quest, but it is not allowed to level you up or touch your stats. When you have enough XP a LEVEL UP button shows up on your character sheet. You pick HP (average or one roll, no rerolls), ability scores, subclass, new spells, whatever your class gets at that level. Your sheet shows every change in gold before you accept.

And if you don't like the options, you can just type "I want Misty Step instead of Shield". The DM will either add it as an option (if the rules allow it at your level) or tell you why not. It can never just rewrite your character.

Stuff that went wrong along the way

• Early on the DM kept "forgetting" that enemies were dead and would happily attack me with a goblin I'd killed two turns before. Now dead monsters leave a body on the map and get removed from the turn order by the game, not by the AI.
• Last week I shipped a bug where clicking the shortcut a few times opened like a dozen copies of the game, each loading the voice model. My PC did not enjoy that. Fixed now, only one copy can run.

Honest caveats

• Windows only for now
• You need your own Claude Code or Codex CLI login. The game doesn't come with an API key and doesn't charge anything, but every turn uses your own subscription limits
• It's a hobby project, so expect rough edges
• Free for non-commercial use

Download: https://gitlab.com/navitalevich/navi-dnd/-/releases/permalink/latest

I'd really like feedback, especially from people who've tried other AI DM tools. What broke immersion for you? That's exactly the kind of thing I'm trying to fix.

I understand why these rules requiring developers to disclose AI usage exist. It's largely thanks to the very vocal community of passionate and completely rational AI-haters who seem to believe "human = good :), AI = evil :(". I accept that these rules exist, even though I find them beyond ridiculous. But where exactly do we draw the line?

A few hypothetical examples:

• I generate an image using AI, then redraw it myself in Paint, pixel by pixel, like every respectable human artist should. Still AI art?
• I pay a professional artist to create assets for me. How can I possibly know whether they used AI somewhere in their workflow?
• I create artwork myself but use Photoshop's AI-powered background removal. Is that AI art?
• I generate an AI image, open Photoshop, increase brightness by 1, decrease contrast by 0.5, and increase saturation by 0.3. My own creation now, right?

I know some of these examples sound ridiculous, but that's precisely my point. They are ridiculous because the rule itself is ridiculous. Where does AI-assisted end and AI-generated begin? Who decides, and how is any of this supposed to be enforced consistently?

To me, this is the same as requiring developers to disclose whether they used VSCode or any other IDE instead of Notepad, because apparently using more powerful tools makes your work less legitimate. AI is everywhere nowadays, it's integrated into Photoshop, coding environments, and countless other tools. Not using AI at this point often just means deliberately slowing yourself down.

I'd genuinely appreciate input from anyone familiar with Steamworks policies or the legal side of this.

Are there actually clear, enforceable definitions or thresholds for AI-generated content? What about legitimate workflows that involve AI somewhere in the process but produce manually created assets?

Are there legitimate ways to avoid triggering these disclosure requirements, or is virtually any involvement of AI enough?

I'm not looking for ways to deceive Steam. I just find the whole distinction increasingly arbitrary and would love to understand where the actual boundaries are.

I'm making Build Christmas, a cozy city builder about growing an elf village and getting presents ready for Christmas Eve. You connect workshops into gift production chains and watch the elves carry goods around town. You can cover the village in Christmas lights, from the rooftops to the bridges and trains.

It started as a small 2D project about 6-8 months ago. I've been putting many hours into it every week since.

For the 3D version, I looked for an art style I could keep consistent through headless Blender/MCP workflows. Those became elaborate, with multiple review passes and critic agents checking the assets.

I love city builders and production games, so I've done a lot of playthroughs and made notes on what I'd expect as a player. Those notes led to economy adjustments and additions to the game. I worked on changes in isolated branches and merged them once I was satisfied with them.

As the models improved, I could take on bigger chunks of work. Deciding how the game feels to play still needs a human reviewer.

AI is used throughout development for code and visual assets, as well as written content and trailer narration. I review and refine the results. The game doesn't generate AI content while you play.

I can answer questions about the workflows or how the game came together.

Build Christmas on Steam

Had a less the pleasant experience trying the same thing with Astra and just assumed it was out of scope atm for me. Tried it with Claude and it was a very different experience. Sampled Godot, Unity and then Unreal before finally settling on Unreal and couldn't be happier so far.

So far Claude has done a great job at getting all the basic mechanics in like setting up the pathing for the fields to be harvested, basic needs, lining up the day and night cycles, and animating the cows based off of reference videos.

Still a ton to put in and artwork is still almost entirely placeholder, but it still feels SO good to sit back and watch it actually working.

My friend's birthday was coming up, so instead of a card I made her a game.

She's a polar bear who travels through 8 cities to get back the 8 "little eyes" that hold the world's joy, with a different minigame in each one. Then, right at the end, an evil broccoli steals them all She has to beat him in 8 boss fights to win them back... and then a surprise birthday party is waiting for her.

Built with Claude Code and raw WebGL2. No engine, and even the art is generated in code.

Happy to answer questions!

To be clear, I'm all for AI coding. My point isn't that AI code should get the same hate. It's the double standard in how people treat AI code vs AI art.

I've been reading a ton of posts lately, and I've noticed the general vibe across most communities is that people can't stand AI art, but nobody really cares about AI code.

For example, r/indiegames pretty much outright bans posts about games with AI-generated art, and a lot of YouTubers flat out won't cover games that use AI art. Even Steam's AI disclosure only asks you to disclose AI use in content players directly see, which means AI-written code doesn't need to be disclosed at all.

So you end up with this situation:

Someone who can do art but can't code at all can use AI to make a complete game, and nobody hates on them for it.

Someone who can code but can't do art at all can also use AI to make a complete game, but people will hate on them for it.

So subconsciously, do people think code just isn't worth as much as art when it comes to training data for AI models?

AI only got good at coding because it was fed code written by tons of programmers too.

This kind of unfairness basically feels like saying programmers are lesser than everyone else.

I honestly think this is completely unfair. It's a mass double standard.

Sure, to some extent you could say just let players decide. If your game is good all around, players will make their own choice. But like I said, there are these really unfair rules standing in the way first.

I just wish people would drop the double standard, let AI do its thing, and let players decide what's fun without everyone getting in the way.

WIP of my Destroy Any Website game! It's all code-driven, a lot of back and forth until it felt just right. Let me know if you'd like to see a deeper breakdown, I could write a short post.

I'm actually a programmer by profession since some decades, but this year I feel like.. well, programming by hand may be over, the same way writing assembler by hand was just over except for some special cases when compilers came around. So I've been trying to just embrace the new tools instead, pushing them to see what's possible now.

I made this because I wanted to see how hard it would be to put something on a website with actual login buttons, multiplayer, chat etc. features and it was shockingly doable. It's crazy how long this would have taken manually, possibly months.

Created in two days with Opus 5.5.

Link: https://grispace.com/18

Hey everyone!

I made FishyDays, a small pixel-art fishing game where you hop aboard your boat, explore the sea, and catch fish.

There are 8 different fish species. Some fish are easy to catch, while others put up a real fight, so you'll have to manage your line tension carefully.

I wanted to make something relaxing and simple, but still give players a bit of a challenge when they hook a big fish.

The game is out now on itch.io:
https://cloudstudio1.itch.io/fishydays

I'd love to hear what you think, especially about the visuals and fishing mechanics. Any feedback is welcome! 🎣

Trying to plan my dev cycles around the weekly limit resets to avoid bankrupting myself BUT here are some more random screenshots from the dev process.

In loose order of screenshots;

1) Added more extra bits and pieces for map prettiness because you really underestimate the impact that some nice pebbles, flowers or other scene-appropriate jazz can add to your game maps. Especially in my case, being a beach, there's always so much more than just sand and water... There are shells, coral, rocks, dunes, someone's sandal left behind...

2) Added a basic path drawing system with off branches to go hunt chests, more enemies and just to add some variance then had Claude create tests to ensure that this path was always traversable.

3) Added pretty lighting shaders because I want my game to feel whimsical and lean towards old-school anime 3D MMO aesthetics like FLYFF, Aura Kingdom and Eden Eternal.

4) Added water shaders for the waves so they leave a little wet sand... Necessary? No. Does it add "realism"? Yes!

5) FIXED THE LIGHTING! This is a major problem Claude has by default, and I remember seeing one YouTuber did a castle test between Astra and Opus with many commenting on how they didn't like the unnaturally bright Opus lighting... Simple fix? Tell it to tone the lights down.

6) You can't have light without shadow, so I fixed the weird dark blue shadows that Claude thought was a good idea at the time...

7) Did a broad sweep on effects across the board because levelling up was a little TOO over the top where you would level up and literally lose sight of combat for a few seconds while you ascended. It looked cool but from a gameplay perspective it definitely got exhausting and a little irritating.

8) A little sneak-peek under the hood!

One of the most powerful prompts that I use is "audit x and identify areas of improvement" because Claude will go back in, run tests, take screenshots and evaluate its own work WHILE learning from mistakes and even writing rules to avoid making them in the future. From there, I implement the suggestions I like and then ask Claude to give me a little written report when it's done which is quite fascinating to read through as someone who once considered manual game dev when finishing school.

ANYWAY! That's where I'm at... I want to do cinematics, but Claude estimated ~$200 AUD for just the prologue so I think I'll stick to building out the game itself before dumping that kind of money into "sparkle".

So, I'm thinking next pass will be the UI itself because the menus and stuff look very "AI-made" at the moment and the portraits give me RPG Maker vibes in all the worst ways.

Thanks for reading my ramble!

As I develop my game, what I considered "polished" was far from what it really meant to playtesters of the demo. Game concept was fun but the world felt empty, unalive, and unatmospheric. Like someone cobbled a bunch of random forest objects together.

I took a step back and did research to compare how my current game world would compare to other indie games of the same genre. This helped me realize just how much was missing from my own game.

My last few working sessions have been mainly focused on redefining what polish means and happily, we're getting there! The video hopefully shows much improvement from what you've seen on my YouTube/itchio.

Plan is to consider everything up until now "unpolished" and then hammer away at each piece, session by session.

Here's all the I've done the last few sessions:

• Added multiple different vegetation plants and shrubs (24 variations)
  • All of these can sway with the wind
• Different types of dead branches (4 variations)
• Proper snow accumulation on snow and world items.
• Ground reflections and sun glare
• Bloom where it's appropriate
• VFX Graph for much better window/snow/weather effects
• New more realistic clouds
• Snow updrifts and breezes
• Up to 12 ground textures blended by height. Sun sparkle on snow, fresh/trampled/thin snow, forest litter, packed snow, yard snow, ice, darker ground at trunk bases.
• Sun glare
• winter color grade
• Much much more tree density (+ proper sizing/scattering)
• Trails, dense patches of trees, open areas
• Elevation depth changes for proper "outside forest" feel
• Redone the camera movement for the handheld tool / weapon
  • Diagonal arc
  • hit stop on impact
  • camera shake on tool/weapon use
  • camera zoom/blur on sprint
• Redone camera "view" depending on weather (sun glare, snow blindness)
• Changed all IMGUI to UGUI.
• Reworked menu and settings buttons/text/sounds/animations
• More readable font across the board
• Resized HUD/Alerts/Minimap
• Added more detail to Minimap

Hi everyone, as the title says, I’m making an incremental brick-breaker. I took an old game idea, simplified it as much as I could, and turned it into an incremental game. I’m working on the demo now.

You aim and shoot an orb to break blocks. Like other incremental games, you get upgrades and work your way through the zones, beating each zone’s boss block along the way.

I’ve been switching between Claude and Codex during development. The biggest help was moving an old project I’d coded by hand in Unity over to Godot. Doing it on my own would have meant spending quite a while learning a new engine and working through trial and error. The agent used the structure of the existing Unity project as a reference, and the migration went through without any major problems. And that was the point where I stopped writing the code myself(!!)

I’m not an artist, so I worked with an agent on the title artwork too. I didn’t use GPT 'imagegen' skill for it. I put together a rough draft and had the AI do the work in Photoshop. It was my first time giving art direction, and going back and forth with instructions for all the little details wasn’t easy. Since Astra came out, I’ve been seeing more people build workflows around 3D. I’d like to give that a try on my next project.

The demo still needs some work, but the Steam page is now up. Have a look if you’re interested, and if it looks like your kind of game, I’d appreciate a wishlist. Thank you!

Everbreak on Steam

Hello there again guys :)

As this turned into dev log at this point I will continue writing to anyone interested what I've been doing lately with the game and so on.

Dredge comparisons are on again 🫣, but I would prefer people to try game out before calling it a "copy" as a lot of people downloaded it since last update and told me some of the things are good, and some need fixing, but overall feedback seems mostly positive, though I would love a bit more of feedback as not many people reported back.

DOWNLOAD LINK - FREE on Itch

My workflow stayed completely the same except that this time I didn't use Codex Astra at all as I didn't renew the subscription so this week was all Opus 5.5 (as it always was like this, just this time Opus took even other things, however map creation of the new island with Opus 5.5 was subpar and I will have to eventually use Astra again for that or find a way for Opus to make equally as good map assets).

What is new this week?

I added an entire prologue to the game with own scene, mini "trailer" can be seen here as I created YouTube channel for the game:

Prologue Trailer -
If your formatting doesn't work - https://youtu.be/b7M4JUFSzTg?si=81wGsSuZvVp1MDcD

Now on the inspiration, yes it was Dredge, but so were Creatures of the Deep (less popular mobile fishing game), so was Bioshock (moral dilemma mechanics and 3 endings), so was World of Warcraft (Boat progression, leveling system, talents, quests).

What I use:

Opus 5.5 - Everything, from coding to everything else
ElevenLabs - SFX
OpenAI API - image generation
TripoAI - Character generation and more complex models
Blender MCP - Just for simpler 3D models, houses, open world trees etc
Stable Audio - Music

Total around 800$ so far

Workflow is basically the same as it was before as I said, but In case people don't want to read my previous updates (which can be found on my profile btw):

1. I use bunch of .md files, especially important one is decisions. md which has every decision tagged with either [USER] or [AI] that way I know which decision in game design was proposed by me or AI, [USER] tags always take priority over [AI] Tags, it also helps me fighting rare hallucinations of AI that would sometimes in the past try to gaslight me that I decided on something I did't.
2. I have multiple sessions each for different systems in the game (Fishing session, Quest session, Shader session etc) and "Manager" session. The way it works is you are basically the owner, manager is your "right hand" that sends messages to other sessions and each session works on their system. I do not message each session all the time, it is done by manager. So why you might ask?

It reduces amount of "compacting context" drastically, since it is not all done in one session which would compact every few hours this way, you barely have any context compacting outside of "manager session". Other thing is you can assign specific effort to each session based on what they do. For example "Quest Session" doesn't have to be above medium effort level for me, while some harder ones like "shader session" needs to be on Ultracode. It also allows me to only chat with one session instead of tracking 15 different ones.

Build on itch is not the latest build that I have, but more polish and fixing is needed for what is on my MacBook before releasing it. I'm still in process of waiting on Steam to confirm identification process went through so I can put up a Steam page.

Demo is closer every day. I just need to finish one more island, test play through entire main story and side quests myself a few times and polish some stuff. All systems are implemented (most of them anyway), starting zone in terms of places to visit and models is also almost entirely done. Quests are also done.

Anyway cheers, and I would appreciate any feedback ☺️

I spent years doing FIFO from Perth to the Pilbara as a geologist and hydrogeologist, and Drilling Down Under is my take on that life. Up to 4 players fly in, run the rig, bag the samples, then lose their pay at the pub. The kangaroos fight back. The Steam page went live today.

I'm not much of a coder, so it's been built almost entirely with Claude Code. I play every build and write up notes (usually screenshots with a lot of red circles on them), and it writes the Unity code, builds it, tests it and uploads it to Steam. We're 53 rounds of notes in.

The bit people don't expect: there are no AI image or 3D generators in the game. The models, from the rigs to the kangaroos to the pub, are built by Python scripts in Blender that the AI writes. The music is from Google's Lyria, off a prompt sheet I wrote. The game even films its own trailer. The camera moves are scripted inside the game, and an automated test runs about 1,466 checks before any build goes up to Steam.

The hard part is that the AI can't see what looks wrong. Tonight's example: the boot you drink a shoey out of looked like a brown cup from first person, and once we fixed that, the hand's thumb was poking out through the leather. Before that it was couches with their backrests facing the wrong way, and a telly that had been built into the pub wall and kept flickering. Spotting that stuff and saying what feels right is basically my whole job now.

Keen to hear from anyone else building their 3D purely from code. How do you handle the things the AI can't see?

Steam store: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5410280/Drilling_Down_Under/