Workflow

I used the Unity game engine to build a dynamic weather system. There are three main systems that are all interacting with each other, a 24-hour day and night system, a weather system, and a foliage reactivity system. Integrating Claude into Unity helped develop this system a lot. This will be used for my game - GRIMLIFE, an open world survival RPG. I'll try to answer any questions in the comments! Any feedback is appreciated 🤓

STEAM: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5197820/GRIMLIFE/

17 years ago, when I was 14, I ran a Tales of Pirates private server called One Piece Online.

The community had made the server source available, and that gave me a starting point. The setup I used back then was C++ running on Windows Server 2003. Now I'm coming back to it with a different idea of what I want to build.

I've burned through the equivalent of four weekly Astra usage limits getting here. Luckily, I had access to usage resets, which let me keep going. The result so far is Corals, a playable browser alpha built from that old project.

I replaced the old C++ client with a browser client, rebuilt the database layer around PostgreSQL, and moved the backend to Linux. Getting accounts, character persistence and gameplay working together again has been a big part of the work.

A big part of my workflow was using /goal to give Astra time to dig through the old code and work out how the game's systems fit together. The longest of those runs lasted 36 hours. Before rebuilding a mechanic, I needed to understand what the existing code was actually doing. Those long runs helped me work through that, system by system.

I'm keeping the original assets and core mechanics as a foundation. From there, I want to build my own lore and change the gameplay into something I always felt was missing from the original.

Sailing is a good example. I always found the old navigation mechanics a bit too simple. I found a project called Open Ocean on GitHub and have been using it, with Astra's help, to rework that part of the game. That's the kind of change I want to make throughout Corals: take the starting point I already have and see how much further I can develop it.

The video shows where the alpha is today: previewing classes, visiting the blacksmith, exploring, fighting in the snowy forest and sailing out of the harbor. I cut the waiting around, but kept the gameplay at its original speed. There's still plenty of work to do on the game.

There's something pretty strange about returning to a project from when you were 14 and finally being able to build the ideas you had for it. That's what this project is for me.

Has anyone here used AI to come back to an old game project? How far did you end up taking it from the original?

You can try the current alpha here:s https://corals-web-production.up.railway.app

If you'd like to see where this goes, you can follow me on itch : https://antoinecarle.itch.io/coral too. I'll be sharing updates there as I keep working on Corals. And if you give it a try, I'd love to hear what you think.

Hey r/aigamedev, solo dev here 👋

I've been building a browser idle RPG since February, probably 1,000+ hours so far. I've worked in games for 15+ years, but I'm not an artist, and I'm one person.

So I leaned on AI hard, for both sides:

🎨 About 1,000 AI-generated images: 722 items, 77 monsters, 87 UI icons, plus spells, pets, dungeons, events and region maps.

💻 The code is mainly AI-assisted too, using an AI coding assistant for almost everything from features to deploy scripts.

Here's an honest breakdown of where it delivered and where it didn't.

✅ WHAT AI DID FOR THE ART

It took the game from all emoji to something that looks like a real game. As a solo dev I could never have paid for 1,000 icons.

But only once I stopped prompting and built a pipeline:

🔁 Every icon is generated from the game data. A script reads the item list, builds a prompt from the name and description plus a style guide, and saves a small webp.

💾 A manifest stores a hash of each prompt, so only new or changed content gets generated. 20 new items cost 20 images, not 1,000.

💸 Low quality at 1024px downscaled to 128px looks basically the same as high quality at icon size. Around a cent per icon.

🧯 A missing icon falls back to an emoji, so nothing ever breaks.

❌ WHERE THE ART NEEDED ME

👉 One style prompt for everything failed. Half my skill icons were unreadable at 32px on a dark brown panel: brown subjects vanished, and thin things like bows and fishing rods became a one-pixel smudge. I had to write a separate UI style that asks for chunky shapes, no thin lines and strong contrast against that exact background.

👉 Never put the game's name in an image prompt. The model paints it as a title, even when you say "no text".

👉 You can't prompt your way out of a bad crop. I cropped banners to 5:2 and lost the top and bottom of every subject. The fix was generating at the display ratio, not better prompts.

👉 Editing an item's description changed its prompt hash, and the pipeline wanted to replace dozens of good shipped icons with new random ones. AI will happily regenerate things you already liked.

✅ WHAT AI DID FOR THE CODE

Honestly, a lot. Features that would have taken me a week take a day. Tests, tools, analytics, deploy scripts, admin pages, a wiki generated from the game data.

It also makes a solo project feel like a small team, because I can hand it the boring 80% and spend my time on decisions.

I even set it up so it can't finish a task that adds new content until the art for that content exists.

❌ WHERE THE CODE NEEDED ME

👉 Save and sync bugs. Offline progress, two devices, a tab left open for days. AI writes a confident fix for the symptom very fast. Finding the real cause still took me reading logs and player saves.

👉 It doesn't know what it doesn't know. It will work in an old copy of the project without noticing, and an old copy once got deployed over the live game. Now every release checks what's live before anything goes out.

👉 Every "done" needs checking. Tests passing is not the same as the feature working in the browser.

🤔 WHAT AI COULDN'T DO AT ALL

Design.

The progression, balance, quests and numbers are where most of my 1,000 hours went. AI can build any system I describe, but it can't tell me if the system is fun, if a skill feels too slow at level 70, or why players quit on day two.

That part is still the whole job.

If anyone wants to see how it all turned out, the game is free in the browser, no signup needed:

https://dragonscapeidle.com/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=post&utm_campaign=launch&utm_content=aigamedev

I'd love to hear from others shipping real games with AI:

• How do you keep a consistent art style across hundreds of assets?

• Has anyone found a way to make thin objects (bows, staffs, rods) readable at small sizes?

• Where has AI-assisted code burned you the worst?

• Has AI helped you with game design at all, or only with building?

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline or the workflow 🙏

I've always liked writing things down when I'm trying to understand something. Especially physics and math. I usually have a notebook or a whiteboard covered in equations, arrows, diagrams, and half-finished ideas.

But when I got stuck, asking AI for help was a little awkward. I had to type everything out or take a picture of my work and explain what I was trying to do.

I started wondering whether I could build something where I could just write naturally and have AI interact with what was on the page.

That's how PlotEveryday started.

I wanted to see if I could make a canvas where AI could understand handwritten equations, diagrams, and the context of what I was working on. The idea was to make learning feel more like having someone sitting beside you rather than opening another chat window.

I started with a basic writing canvas and gradually added the AI interaction. Then I kept experimenting with what else could be done when the AI could see and interact with the canvas.

Now you can use it to:

• Write equations and work through physics or math problems.
• Draw diagrams and ask AI about your work.
• Get hints and feedback instead of just being handed the answer.
• Write notes, sketch random things, and explore ideas.
• Play tic-tac-toe and other little games with AI.

And then, naturally, I added a Harry Potter mode where the canvas becomes Tom Riddle's diary. You can actually have a conversation with it. 😂

The project is still pretty early, and there are plenty of things I want to improve. But it's been a really fun way to learn about building AI applications, working with canvas interactions, and figuring out how to make models respond to things beyond plain text.

For anyone who's curious about building something with AI: I didn't start with some grand plan to build a complete platform. I just had a small idea that seemed useful, built a basic version, and kept adding things as I thought of them. A lot of the fun came from seeing what was possible and learning along the way.

I thought some of you might enjoy trying it out too.

PlotEveryday is free to try, but you'll need to use your own API key.

If you give it a shot, I'd genuinely love to know what you think. What works, what doesn't, and what would you want to do with a canvas like this?

Also, if you build things yourself, I'd love to hear what you've been working on. 🙂

I gave Codex and Claude the exact same prompt to see how differently they'd handle something open-ended and creative:

The prompt: "make me a reactjs + vite, and launch it in port 3004, a game where a fish follows my cursor. make it super creative and majestic"

Setup:

• Claude: Fable 5.1, Extra High
• Codex: Astra 6, Extra High, fast mode

I didn't do any follow-up prompts or manual edits. I just deployed both to Vercel so you can try them yourself:

🐟 Codex (Astra 6): https://fish-indol-eta.vercel.app/
🐠 Claude (Fable 5.1): https://fish2.vercel.app/

My take:

• Codex did amazing on the design and detail. It looks polished and the visuals really lean into "majestic."
• Claude did amazing on the mechanics and gameplay. It feels more like an actual game and is more fun to play.

It's interesting that they read "super creative and majestic" so differently. One went for the visuals, the other for how it plays.

About fast mode: Claude charges extra credits for fast mode, but Codex doesn't, so I only used fast mode on Codex. That's worth knowing if you're choosing between them on cost or speed.

What are your thoughts?

• Which one did you enjoy more, and why?
• For a prompt like this, what matters more to you: how it looks or how it plays?
• Does paying extra for fast mode change which one you'd use day to day?
• If you've run a similar test with other models or settings, how did they do?

I'd love to hear what you think!

So this is basically a follow-up to my first post.
I’ve kept letting GPT-6 work on the Dragon Ball arena fighter, and at this point it’s gone way beyond the original prototype.
I still haven’t really been manually coding the game myself. I mainly give it feedback, explain what I want changed, provide assets/references, and it handles the implementation.
Since the last post it’s been working on stuff like:
Full character combat kits instead of just basic attacks
Unique skills and VFX for each character
Transformations and character-specific rage states
Beam attacks and actual beam clashes
Beam clashes physically pushing the losing side backwards
Grabs that actually connect, hold, and throw the opponent
Knockback, launches, knockdowns, aerial combos, and combo extensions
Vanishes / afterimages
Burst flight dashing
Better hit reactions and facial animations
Character-specific movement and combat animations
Story battles that automatically switch which character you’re controlling
Playable side characters depending on what’s happening in the story
Environmental effects/destruction
Character shaders and lighting
SFX, voice lines, particles, camera effects, hitstop, screenshake, etc.
The biggest thing I’ve noticed is that I barely have to explain HOW to code most of this anymore.
I can say something like “the beam clash feels weak, make both beams fight for position and make the losing character noticeably get pushed backwards” and it’ll figure out the systems needed to actually make that happen.
Same with animations. I’ve mostly been describing how I want attacks to feel, what body parts should move, how combos should flow into each other, and what references it should follow.
It’s definitely not perfect and I still have to catch bad decisions or things that look weird, but compared to where this was when I started, it’s kinda insane.
The only real assets I started with were character models, some maps, particle/VFX assets, and references.
Pretty much everything connecting those assets into an actual game has been AI-built.
And somehow this thing is starting to feel like an actual Dragon Ball arena fighter instead of an AI tech demo 😭
I’ll probably keep posting updates as I add the later DBZ arcs and eventually Super.

[supprimé]

3 months ago I posted here about a point-and-click game I was making with the help of AI.

I'm a pharmacist, not a programmer, and somehow that post got 28k views 😱 A lot of you were really nice about the game and some asked me to post again when it was finished.

Well... it's finished! 😅

1565 - The Great Siege is OUT NOW and completely FREE!

It's an old-school point-and-click adventure set during the Great Siege of Malta in 1565, with a lot of inspiration from the old LucasArts games I grew up with.

I started this knowing basically nothing about Unity or C#. AI helped me A LOT with the coding and I also used it to create the backgrounds. The characters, animations, inventory items and props were drawn by me in Procreate.

By the end I was pretty tired of testing, fixing bugs, finding another bug, fixing that one... and probably creating another one while doing it. 😂

A HUGE thanks to a good friend of mine who tested every corner of the game and every improbable scenario I never even thought anyone would try! 😅

But after almost a year of working on this thing in my spare time, I can actually say...

I finished a game!

And today, 8th September, is Victory Day here in Malta, which marks the end of the Great Siege. So there really wasn't a better day to release it!!

If anyone wants to give it a go, it's completely free:

https://dfenech1982.itch.io/1565-the-great-siege

Windows, Mac and Linux.

If you do play it, let me know what you think! Good or bad... preferably good though 🙄

Hello there again,

Another update of my fishing game to annoy you all, and again I will link previous updates here:

Week 1 Progress

Week 2 Progress

Week 3 Progress

Week 4 Progress

Week 5 Progress

This time I will leave .exe file for my game if anyone wants to try it and give me some feedbacks. I know million things are not finished, some of the things I haven't even checked yet or got to them, but I will still take into account a lot of feedback if people decide to even try it:

Link to download

Since last week bunch of things were added or fixed:

2 more docking places and their complete 3D scenes (Lighouse docking scene and far island that can be seen in the video).

Bunch of new land mass was added with this almost entire starting zone is done in terms of land, it is left for me to add quests, finish some mechanics, fix map, fix links between quests, add equipment page, add proper rods and items for hull upgrades and what do I know... but hey at least land is done I guess.

I changed models of the houses to have proper roof this time while reducing polygons. New models were done by GPT-6 Astra, but honestly I kinda liked Fable models more? Though I decided that objectively these models are better (just a little bit), I'm just not sure they fit style of the game better, nevertheless I left them in the game.

Lighting at the night was also fixed

Gating of fishing pools behind skill tree points and such.

New island has some houses with broken roofs as it will story wise be almost abandoned island that barely has anyone left, but will have it's small docking scene also (already does). Also another small islands around main island that have traces of life (ruined houses, graveyard, old fishing cabins etc), but are not populated.

Visually maybe there is not a lot of upgrades over last week update, but I think a lot of work was done.

As for frequently asked questions:

I'm on 200$ max Claude Plan, Using Godot as engine, Assets are generated by Claude (last few days Astra) and characters are generated on Tripo 3D, everything is coded by Claude and I have 0 dev experience. I do not plan on releasing game YET, that might change, I will see how promising this project is by the end of September, right now I enjoy working on it and I do this as hobby and a challenge to see how far can FULLY AI made game go, without "one shot prompting".

Feedbacks are always welcome 😊

(INFO TO IMAGES: The orange Ship was my first ship, where i built the system. The bigger, darker Ship is the second one where i enhanced the generation.)

Tech stack: Codex with GPT Astra, Blender, Unity

Hello AI enthusiasts!

I'm Shalke97, though some of you might know me as Adhavar from Heartforge Studios, my one-man indie studio.

I previously posted here about Grim Reach Idle, my dark fantasy, OSRS-inspired idle game. It just passed 1,000 sales, which I'm really happy about, especially for my first fully AI-developed game. That gave me the motivation to try something new.

For those who don't know me, I'm a programmer based in Germany who got tired of how anti-AI a lot of the industry here is. So I decided to do my own thing.

Also, shoutout to u/Gambo7592! Seeing your daily updates on your game made me want to start a dev diary of my own. I am excited to see where you are going with it :-).

The new project is called Citizen of the Stars. The idea is an open-world space game with space trucking, mining, pirate hunting, and maybe some on-planet activities eventually. For now, though, I want to get a simple space trucking game working: fly between stations, take cargo from A to B, and make money. All in a low- to mid-poly art style.

So, this is Day 1: Foundations.

And by “Day 1,” I really mean days 1, 2, and 3. I've already burned through two weeks' worth of Codex usage just getting one thing right: ship generation.

I spent hours tweaking things and occasionally shouting at my screen, but it's finally getting somewhere. Codex can now build a spaceship on its own, with or without references.

For the first ship, I drew the room layout in Paint and used a reference image I found on Google to help explain the style I wanted. Codex built the initial version in about an hour. Getting it to look how I wanted took a lot more back-and-forth. I had to work out how to explain the style, the level of detail, and what actually made the interior feel like a place you could walk around in.

I basically gave Codex free rein on my PC in YOLO mode and let it use Blender to generate the assets. That worked surprisingly well.

As you can see in the images, the early versions were rough. Very basic shapes and not much detail. But after a lot of adjustments, the interiors started to feel pretty immersive, even with the low-poly style. The outer hull still needs the most work, since I've spent most of these first few days focusing on the inside.

The cockpit was a particular headache. At first, the walls were far too thick, and the whole thing felt bulky. We adjusted the proportions, added more interior details, and eventually got it feeling like an actual cockpit. We also added animations for sitting down and getting back out of the seat.

Sitting Animation [WIP]

Oh, and Astra animated the folding stairs and ramp too. I didn't even ask for that.

Flying is already implemented as well. Ships handle differently depending on their mass, so a heavier ship feels slower and less responsive than a smaller one. You can already feel the difference when flying them.

You can also get out of your seat at any time, even while the ship is moving, and walk around inside. That part feels really good already, and it's made me excited to keep building.

After seeing how the first ship turned out, I wanted to give Codex a harder test: the Polaris from... another game.

The version it built was around 400 metres long. And after everything we'd worked out on the first ship, this one took about 40 minutes.

It was MASSIVE. The hangar hatch on top was animated, and you could actually land the smaller ship inside it. There's obviously more to making a game than generating a huge ship, but seeing that work made me think I could take this further than I'd initially expected.

The latest addition is the hauler. It has a lot more detail now, and I'm really happy with how it's looking.

Next up, I need to give these ships something to do. I'll be working on a model for the player and NPCs, then trying to build the first space station and get the basic cargo loop going.

Thanks for reading! I hope you're as excited about this project as I am.

- Adhavar_HFS

Day 5! been working on expanding the world. the cave system now connects to different biome exits. first two are a beach town and a snowy mountain village. each area has its own characters, forageables, shops, recipes and quests.

still no name for this game lol. FAQ below since i keep getting the same questions. Cheers!

Sunshine Golf Classic is an 18 hole 3D golf game that fits in 13KB. I have a ton of experience making small games like this but I wasn't sure if Claude would be good at size coding. I had to teach it a lot but we ended up being a really good team.

What made it work was giving it better ways to check itself. The build fails if the zip goes a byte over 13k. There are 226 headless tests and a bot plays a full round in the terminal and prints the score. So after any change we could see right away if the course got easier or harder.

That's most of the trick. It's good at building tools that measure things, and good at grinding through measurements I don't have the patience for.

I would sometimes send it to find bytes and it was almost never able to on its own. But if I had a specific idea of how to refactor or change something I could point it at that and it could make the changes and try it out.

At the end of the day I still hand wrote most of the code. I found most of the bytes myself because it didn't know where to look, and did all the gameplay and balance. But it was a good teammate for the parts that are just work. It was also helpful for talking through design changes and gameplay mechanics.

I'm sure claude and other ai agents will make a huge impact in this year's js13k contest. There is still about a week left if you want to try making something.

My game is submitted and you can play it on the official JS13k site...

https://js13kgames.com/2026/games/sunshine-golf-classic#play

Where do you think we are in one year?

The models used if anyone interested:
GPT-5.0-high

GPT-5.2-codex

GPT-5.5-high

GPT-5.6-sol-high

GPT-6.0-astra-high

I've been thinking about that question a lot while building Swipe Arcade.

Most game discovery starts by asking you to decide what you want to play before you've actually played anything.

You browse thumbnails. Read descriptions. Watch trailers. Look at reviews. Scroll through recommendations. Maybe go several pages deep.

And eventually, hopefully, you pick something.

I wanted to try something different:

Open the site. A game is already waiting. Play it.

That's the basic idea behind Swipe Arcade.

The easiest comparison is probably a little bit TikTok, a little bit Chatroulette, but for games: instead of choosing from a wall of thumbnails, you're dropped directly into something playable. If you like it, stay. If you don't, move on to the next one.

One important difference is that Swipe Arcade isn't trying to learn what will keep you scrolling and continually feed you more of the same. You can set exclusions for things you absolutely don't want to play. Beyond those exclusions, discovery is intentionally unpredictable.

For players, the goal is simple: spend less time looking for something to play and more time actually playing.

There's also another side of this experiment that I think might be even more interesting:

What happens when the game gets to make the first impression instead of its marketing?

How many enjoyable indie games are sitting out there with a bad thumbnail?

Or a mediocre trailer?

Or six reviews?

Or no marketing budget?

Or no initial audience?

Or they're simply buried underneath thousands of other games?

Maybe someone would actually love that game. They just never had a chance to click on it. That's what I want to experiment with on the developer side of Swipe Arcade.

Approved games enter the discovery rotation. They're not being submitted just to become another thumbnail sitting ten pages deep in another directory.

The player encounters the playable game itself.

I'm at the point now where the platform is up and running, and I need the most important thing I don't have yet:

More games!

I'm looking for the first group of indie developers with browser-playable games or playable web demos who are willing to put them into Swipe Arcade's rotation.

A few important things for developers:

• It's free to submit and free to be included.
• You keep ownership of your game.
• There's no exclusivity requirement.
• I'm not promising thousands of players instantly. This is a brand-new platform, and I'm building the initial library right now.
• I want feedback from early developers. If something about Swipe Arcade doesn't work well for your game, I would love to know about it.

I'm also beginning to build a playtester community around Swipe Arcade. Longer term, I'd like the platform to become useful for more than discovery, giving developers a way to get their games in front of people who actually want to try new things and provide useful feedback.

That's still early, though.

Right now, I'm focused on building the first game library and finding out whether this approach to discovery actually works.

If you've made a browser game and you're willing to be one of the first developers in the rotation, I'd really love to see what you've built.

Swipe Arcade: swipe-arcade.com

There's a Submit a Game option in the menu, or you can go directly to swipe-arcade.com/submit.

And even if you don't have something to submit, I'm very interested in what other developers think about the premise:

Would you rather have players judge your game from its thumbnail, or get dropped directly into the game and let it make its own first impression?

Thanks for readying and I hope to hear from you!