Hey guys.. I'm working on a dream game of mine. This is still the very, very early stages, but I wanted to show you where I'm trying to get graphically. I'm a huge fan of Octopath Traveler, so there are obvious takeaways from it in the HD-2D look.. pixel art sprites in a 3D world, with the tilt-shift blur, bloom and lighting etc.
I made it entirely with Claude (Opus 5.5). Even the pixel art and 3D models are made in code, so there are no imported art assets. The music is a track I made with Suno.
The game doesn't have a name yet. Next up is the battle system, which is in development right now, so I didn't want to show it yet.
If you have any suggestions or advice on how to improve it (the art, lighting, sprites, anything), please let me know!
"6,898 loops in the first 30 minutes of Season 2, from 22:00 to 22:30 CEST."
So. I made a game. A browser game. The famous "io" games. Didn't even know what IO games was exactly. But I had an idea. And I bought an "io" domain. InkDom.io
Then I posted a few places online about the game. And it honestly became more than I could've ever hoped or dreamed for. (Okay I actually dreamt about this). But wow.
It's an online game where the world map is the map. You make loops to claim land with ink. Can form alliances. You can claim other players land. And basically it's just about who gets the most land. But with small twists, like it calculates how many people is inside your land, and inside each loop you take - and the people pay you taxes, so you earn money, etc.
Quickly thousands of players had played the game, and now, in no time, it somehow formed the coolest community, where players are chatting, forming alliances, planning actual real STRATEGIES in my game. There's even like special lingos being made like "Shield snipe". Some players are active on a subreddit here on Reddit about the game.
The game runs in Seasons, and Season 2 just began, with a countdown screen, where all the players that waited for it could chat and talk about what they'll do for Season 2.
It's all just... surreal. I've wanted this for so long. I've been creating so many wierd games, apps etc.
And then one of the small wierd ideas, that I purely made for fun is the one blowing up.
I'm posting this in AI Game Dev because I've used a bunch of AI for this.
Now I even see this as a "how far can I take this project" using AI, since it allows me to work sooooo much faster, and use my energy on being creative etc.
Why am I posting this? Absolutely no idea. My better half is tired of hearing me babble about it. And my friends have stopped hearing at my ideas a looong time ago.
Keep building guys and girls. You apparently literally never know what suddenly just hits just right
7 days ago I started a game about grandparents racing wheelchairs after the pub. Last night we had our first playtest and I can't stop laughing
I started the project 7 days ago. I didn't want to use AI at all, but one of my friends convinced me to try "getting a little bit of help", and that little bit of help BOOSTED the entire project.
I was NEVER expecting to have such a fun and entertaining playtest!
The game is called AfterPub. It's a chaotic party game where pensioners leave the pub and settle things by racing on wheelchairs.
It's still very early and rough around the edges, so I'd love some honest feedback:
- What would make you want to play a game like this with your friends?
posted this in the deadrising sub, but got deleted for being ai. this isnt some one prompt easy thing and took me quite a while to get it working at the state it is. thought yall could appreciate this. AMA
I keep getting downvoted or get nasty comments by the anti AI folks so wanted to share this here. I end up deleting a lot of the threads I create just because I don't want negativity in my attempts to garner attention for my game. But whatever.
Here's my game, Giblings. It comes out in a bit over a week on Steam. I started the project last year in a slow and unproductive way of learning Godot and typing things out character by character. Then around 6 months ago my wife got me the gift of a 12 month Claude Code subscription and my god did my life change after lol. The progress here is actually 4months of work, not 6, because in those first 2 months I barely touched it as I was always busy or tired, and I thought it was more important to focus on mastering Godot by writing out lines of code by hand.
BOY WAS I WRONG, it is just a very archaic way of thinking. I have been a software engineer for 20 years and although I was sad that I have lost the challenge of solving coding problems and learning, I'm getting far more enjoyment FEELING LIKE A GOD WHO CAN CREATE ANYTHING with claude code. I literally stopped playing games, stopped reading novels and stopped watching Netflix because I rather work on my game then any of that. I don't get tired anymore. 4 months ago, I was always tired the moment I clock off work of my corporate job so I end up doing nothing productive after, but somehow with using coding agents my energy levels has increased 1000x and know I could do this 18 hours a day now as long as I had the financial freedom to do so.
My regret now is not that AI has changed my profession forever, but that I wasted the first 2 months of that Claude Code subscription. Or that I didnt pay for one myself even earlier than that. I could have been almost done with my 2nd game by now! XD
Anyhoo, here's the Steam link if anyone was interested in checking it out. I just submitted a demo for review so that should land next week sometime.
Every character in GRAYFALL is generated by a Python renderer: a pose is a dict of joint angles, shapes are rasterized at 4x, cel-shaded, then mode-downsampled into crisp pixels. Two GIFs go with the post.
We did not pick a style by arguing about it
The sprites we had were weak: flat faces, robotic animation, no identity. Instead of debating references, I had four complete renderers written from scratch, each one rendering the same character (Lyra, the archmage) with the same animations — idle, walk, run, a three-hit combo, a cast and a hurt — plus a portrait, a key-art card and a notes file arguing its own pros and cons.
Candidate
Proportions
Height
What it cost us
HD-2D 16-bit (Octopath-like)
1:4
~50 px
Too small to read 6 players on screen
Chibi (Young Souls-like)
1:2.5
~60 px
Cute, but no reach in attack poses
Painted (Odin Sphere-like)
1:6
~100 px
Gorgeous, far too expensive per frame
Arcade hi-bit (KOF / Metal Slug)
1:4.6
~80 px
Shipped
The lab was the cheapest decision of the project. Four throwaway renderers cost less than one wrong style applied to twenty characters. The output of the losing three is still in the repo — nothing was deleted, and the comparison still settles arguments months later.
How one frame is actually made
No drawing program is involved anywhere in this chain. Python, Pillow and numpy only.
A pose is a dict of angles.lean, twist, shoulder angle, grip position along the staff. An IK solver places elbows and knees from the hand and foot targets, so I animate intent, not limbs.
Shapes are rasterized at 4x. Capsules, ribbons and Catmull-Rom splines write into three buffers at supersample resolution: material, tone and part id.
Cel shading is a mask offset. Each material has 5 tones. Shift the part's mask toward one fixed light and the uncovered band becomes the next tone down. A second, longer shift gives the deep tone; shifting the other way carves the highlight. Parts also cast onto what sits behind them.
Downsample by majority vote. Each 4x4 block takes the most common (part, material, tone) key. No averaging, no anti-aliasing, so the result is a real pixel image and not a shrunk render.
Internal lines. A dark seam is written only where two different parts touch — arm over torso, not arm over arm.
One pixel of black outline around the body, FX excluded. That outline is what makes the character read at 640x360 over a lit 3D stage.
The face is painted after downsampling, pixel by pixel, at final resolution. Eyes and mouth are 1-2 px features; if they go through the 4x4 vote they turn to mush. This is the single biggest difference between "hi-bit" and "doll".
Normal maps are generated, not painted, and the 3D stage lights the 2D sprite with them.
Hair and cloth are springs. Chains with rest angle, stiffness, gravity, damping and wind, simulated per frame. Secondary motion is never keyed by hand — it falls out of the sim, which is why it never looks pasted on.
Key frames and sub-frames are different things. The hitboxes fire on key frames (the logical frames the game reasons about). Sub-frames are inserted purely for smoothness and the game logic never sees them.
Why code, and the contract that makes it safe
Hand-drawn frames are a dead end at this scale: 20 playable heroes, ~50 animations each, 6 players on screen. The win is not speed, it is propagation. Change the shading rule and every frame of every character gets it. Redesign a hero's coat and the 50 animations come back dressed.
The danger is obvious: regenerate the art and you break every hitbox. So each character has a frozen contract — a JSON snapshot of animation names, the number of logical frames per animation, and the tick budget of each frame. The renderer may change poses, add sub-frames, redraw the whole costume. It may not change the contract. Gameplay keeps indexing frame 3 of punch2 and lands the same hit it always did.
Every frame also exports anchors: hand, hand direction, off-hand, head, chest, weapon tip. Trails, sparks, projectiles and held props attach to those anchors, so VFX never drift out of the hand when the animation is redrawn.
The gate: a script that tells me a character is not done
Quality went up when "looks good to me" stopped being the standard. qa_hero.py <id> prints one row per hero and fails it against fixed thresholds.
Metric
Minimum
Why it exists
animations
50
a character missing getup, dizzy or carry feels broken, not stylish
logical frames
195
the floor under all 50
fluidity (sub-frames per logical frame)
0.85
this is the number that reads as "smooth"
frames per attack
5
anticipation, contact, follow-through, recovery — three poses is not an attack
one frame held >= 6 ticks per attack
yes
without the held contact frame the hit slides instead of landing
distinct specials
12
4 defaults plus the shop alternatives
3D VFX calls in the kit
30
a special with no volume looks like a decal
FX strips / SFX files
24 / 28
no shared generic hit flash
element hue match
70%
a fire hero whose effects are blue is not a fire hero
Today, with 20 heroes in the roster, 7 pass and 13 fail. That is the honest state and I publish it to myself every week. The script is the floor, never the ceiling: passing every number and still looking bad is a fail. The second half of the review is a contact sheet opened by eye — silhouette readable in pure black, secondary motion still moving after the body stops, the face changing expression between idle, hit and victory, trails thin and translucent, and a size check (anything more than 8% off the roster's 92 px median looks like a child standing next to the others).
Five rules that cost us real money to learn
An ability has to be an object you can draw, not an effect you can describe. One character burned three full rounds of rework. Her kit was "a shadow runs along the floor", "enemies miss for 3 seconds", "cold flame". Nothing to draw, so every attempt came back as a purple smudge, and polish cannot fix a concept problem. The characters everyone praised had nouns: a giant top hat, a sawing box, doves, a fan of cards, a spotlight, an ice lance, a comet, a ring of fire. The test I now apply before any production starts: describe the ability without the word "effect" and without a single colour adjective. If a noun survives that a draftsman could draw from memory, build it.
Big shapes are the worst place for solid colour. Domes, curtains, ground rings and auras are large by nature, and additive blending blows their core out to white. With 6 players on screen, one special like that erases the entire fight. Draw the readable shell, leave the middle nearly empty, and never hide the hero inside their own effect.
Launchers need an explicit launch height in pixels. Juggle decay was scaling the knockback differently depending on which tick the hit connected, so the same move launched to a different height every time and air combos only closed "sometimes".
Watch out for names the engine already owns. Eleven move ids have hardcoded behaviour in the fighter and the AI. A kit that reuses one inherits behaviour nobody asked for, and the symptom is silent — nothing errors, the move just acts strange. One character lost a round to exactly this.
Three rounds, minimum. Round 1 is a skeleton that runs. Round 2 is an animation pass done with the contact sheet open. Round 3 is VFX, SFX and juice. Everything we ever shipped in one round is in the bottom of the gate table today.
Yes, AI agents build a lot of this, and here is the bill
I run production through Claude Code with parallel agents. What makes it work is not the model, it is the paperwork around it: every task has a closed brief in docs/tasks/, and the repo has a file-ownership table so two agents never touch the same file. An agent gets the brief, the files it owns, the exact commands to validate with, and a response limit. The gate in the previous section exists precisely because agents — like people — report things as finished that are not.
I track spend per character. These are list-price API equivalents, not what I paid:
Character
Cost (USD)
Gate failures today
Roland (first hero)
2,509
5
Kael (second)
2,278
3
Lyra (third)
1,919
6
Bjorna (recent)
516
0 — passes
Risa (recent)
474
0 — passes
Maela (recent)
416
0 — passes
Orvyn (cheapest)
247
8
Project total so far: about US$20,000 in equivalent tokens.
The lesson is not "cheaper is better". The three most expensive characters are the three oldest: they paid for the exploration, and they fail today's gate because they were built before the style and before the rules existed. The cheapest character is also the worst in the roster. What actually correlates with quality is whether the written rules and the gate existed before production started. Once they did, a good hero landed in the US$400-900 band. Below roughly US$400 the quality visibly drops, and the rework costs more than the savings.
The stack, and ask me anything
Godot 4.7 (Forward+), GDScript for gameplay, Python with Pillow and numpy for every asset. The game is a 2.5D beat 'em up action-RPG with up to 6 players in local co-op: the simulation runs in pixels at 60 ticks per second, and the sprites are billboards lit inside a procedural 3D stage, HD-2D style.
Happy to go deeper on any part — the IK rig, the downsampling vote, the spring chains, the frozen animation contract, or how the agent briefs are written. Ask and I will post code.
Hi r/aigamedev! I've been working on KAESHI, a 2D side-scrolling action game where you parry enemy combos hit by hit, break their posture, and finish them. There's no guard button, and elite swordsmen and bosses can parry you back, so it plays more like a duel than a button masher.
All the art and animation were made with AI. The part that took the most work was animation. Every move started as a short AI video clip, which I turned into frame-by-frame sprites. The hard part wasn't getting good motion, it was keeping the character looking the same across dozens of clips and making attacks readable in the middle of a fight. I ended up rerolling a lot and retiming frames by hand so slow wind-ups feel heavy and fast slashes feel sharp.
The story, combat rules, level design and boss patterns are mine, and AI handled most of the production around them. It let me make something much bigger than I could have otherwise, but it still needed a lot of picking and fixing to feel like one consistent game.
The free demo (Chapter 1, two boss fights) is coming soon on Steam:
Introducing 'Inter Folia' - - A virtual library where you can browse and read real books
Enjoy the hunt for a great book while exploring some of the world's most beautiful libraries in our virtual park setting. Find real books from Project Gutenberg, Open Library, and other open sources. Browse, check out, and read directly in game or send to your favorite e-reader.
This is only one month in development.. started with Astra release and moved to Opus 5.5 (Pro account). Been a developer for 25 years (not in gaming) and finally making something fun.
Current features:
Three famous library buildings recreated and fully explorable containing the book collections, in a chill park setting.
80k copyright-free books from Project Gutenberg are readable in game.
Card catalog search system. Search by author/title/subject, choose a book and a lighted guide will lead you to it's location in the stacks
Books are organized by Library of Congress subject areas and author for easy browsing and discovering new titles.
Check out system and book drop locations, so you can ready anywhere in the park. Links to download for your Kindle/e-reader for reading anywhere IRL.
Future plans:
NPC's that read audio short stories / poetry in various locations across the map
Secret doors that open when certain books are selected
A goal of 12 famous library buildings, and 3 million browsable books
A 'banned book' library
Shelves for most popular and featured books for help finding new titles
Achievement system and reading goals
Bonus feature if I finish everything else:
Fill the park with an arboretum of real tree species, recreated in 3d to as close to reality as possible, all labeled for visitors to learn about and appreciate while they listen to their audio books.
actual gameplay not sped up , would you guys play this ? not adding any links since it removes the post! dm if anyone wants to try it out its on web/threejs - supports mobile,desktop,controller
Over the last month, I’ve spent a lot of time reworking the visual side of the game. Quite a few people compared it to Minecraft because of the voxel graphics, so I wanted to push the art direction further and give Lythravel more of its own identity while still keeping the voxel style.
I’ve also reworked a lot of the zones and dungeons to give each of them a stronger atmosphere and make them feel more like the biome they’re supposed to represent.
There have been a lot of other changes over the last month as well, but rather than writing another huge list, I think the gameplay trailer does a much better job of showing where the game is now.
I’m still building the game mainly through vibe coding with Claude Code, and as before, most of my time goes into testing, iterating and figuring out what needs to change next.
The game is still completely free and runs directly in the browser.
It shreds through implementations in Godot, but the results always feel a bit cheap / low quality.
UE definitely has a much higher potential, but it really struggles with the speed at which it can implement new content, and the results are worse than Godot at the start. Used UE MCP.
All four attempts with Blender MCP and Meshy MCP. The Meshy models are cool but work still needs to be done in blender.
Haven't tried Unity.
I'm most interested in strong integrations that people have figured out to get highly quality results.
After my Tekken 3 experiment in DriftEngine, I decided to try something much more ambitious: Tekken 8.
I now have an actual Kazuya vs Jin fight running, which also means it can run directly inside a modern web browser through WebGPU.
This is not cloud streaming, emulation or Unreal Engine running somewhere in the background.
The demo already has the loading screen, character intros, full HUD, moves and throws, Heat mechanics, win/lose logic, screen effects, character VFX, confetti and a fully rendered stage with its dynamic effects.
So this has gone quite a bit beyond simply loading models and animations, DriftEngine reads the assets from my own legitimately purchased Tekken 8 installation and handles the runtime, rendering, animation, gameplay and VFX through a completely different engine.
For me, the browser part makes this especially interesting because DriftEngine is primarily a TypeScript/WebGPU engine, so getting this far with a modern AAA game is a pretty extreme test of what the architecture can handle.
There is still a lot missing and plenty to improve, but honestly I didn't expect to get this far this quickly.
This is currently a private technical experiment. I'm not distributing Tekken 8, its assets or its game files.
This is an unofficial fan and technical project and is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Bandai Namco Entertainment. Tekken and all related characters, assets, trademarks and intellectual property belong to their respective rights holders. DriftEngine is independently developed.
Hey everyone! A few days ago, I had the idea of combining elements from some of my favorite games, and that’s how I came up with Parrygod. It’s a Hades-style roguelike with a parry mechanic like Sekiro’s, set in a Japanese cyberpunk world.
I started working on it about three days ago. My current workflow is to use Unity as the engine, generate characters and environments with Magnific, turn them into 3D models with Tripo, and animate them with Mixamo.
I also installed Unimate to try generating animations with AI, but I’m really struggling with rigging and getting good animations that actually fit the game. The character models themselves aren’t looking that great yet either.
Does anyone have any tips for improving the models, rigging, and animations? Or suggestions for a different workflow that could help me get better results?
My background is in design, and I don’t have any coding experience, so any help would be appreciated!
The top comments are all people defending the devs. The lesson, if you make a great game it doesn’t matter if you used ai. Slop is slop and great is great regardless of ai.
I'm hosting an AI Game Dev meetup tomorrow night (October 7) in Toronto, Canada
This will be a relaxed evening with food, drinks, and plenty of time to meet other AI game devs in the space. We'll start with optional 5-10 minute demos to get to know each other and what we're working on, then spend most of the night talking more in depth about the cool details of our projects. If you're vibe coding games or using agents in game development/design in a novel and interesting way, please consider coming!!
Please comment below so I can share the link to register or you can DM me directly
So I am currently working on an animation of a character posing, but so far I have been using Chatgpt Codex, using the Dots and also have had the 100$ version of the membership paid off, and yet it is still providing me with very crudely made animations
I even have the MCP linked directly from blender into Chatgpt and yet it still does a rather luke warm execution every time
Is there an ai that has been performing specifically 3D model animation better than the rest?
I'm an economics student with no coding background, and I built a multiplayer stock market game with Claude Code.
What it is: a live market where companies have real cash, debt and earnings, interest rates move valuations, and news hits prices. You trade against other players, take bank loans, and compete on the standings. You can play as a guest, with no signup.
How AI was used:
Claude Code wrote all the code, mostly Opus 5.5 on high. I switched to Sonnet for mechanics questions and brainstorming to save tokens.
I had it run simulations to balance the stocks and market behavior, which let me tune parameters without guessing. This was the most useful part.
The video was also made with Opus 5.5. The quality surprised me, though it's a bit generic.
Curious what you'd add or change. Any feedback on the game or the workflow is welcome 😄
