This Is Being Human: Tech Demo

Discover fire, invent civilisation, build a space legacy, discover time travel and conquer the galaxy, generation by generation! This is a tech demo for a Noita-inspired survival game on a pretty ambitious scale. The game spans 200,000 years and will take you from barely surviving to thriving as a multi-planetary mining corporation.

Here's a little about the development so far:

Claude code. Fable 5. I have a lengthy background in software engineering but never thought about game development until more recently. It's built on a custom Rust engine running at 120fps.

I've tried LLM-assisted development with a few engines in the past, but the MCP back and forth on Unity, Unreal, Godot, etc never gave me the speed or clarity I wanted.

Stack-wise, I settled on Rust because it's a fantastic language for LLM development. Errors arise immediately because the game just won't compile and it's extremely fast.

Prompts / Planning wise; I knew what I wanted from the tech demo and I started with a PRD along the lines of we're going to build Factorio 2, Noita edition! I was quickly able to generate a fluid-falling sand physics engine; and from there the rest was quite straightforward - things like making the planet a seamless loop, and have its own gravity was a matter of prompts with Fable.

Once I'd run out of usage, I switched to Opus 4.8 with Ultracode to do the heavy lifting on character movement; it's an IK setup that I'd had experience building in the past so again, I knew what I wanted and prompted my way to success.

The thing I'm struggling with the most is building a coherent art style or art direction. This world started off ugly as sin, but there's a certain charm to it that I'm going to lean into. The custom pixel shader does a lot of heavy lifting and makes the whole thing a pleasure to develop with, but I'll be completely honest - I'm going in blind there.

If you'd like to follow along or check out more, you can wishlist or join discord over at thisishumanbeing.com :)

u/beefcutlery — 15 hours ago
▲ 105 r/MarathonGame+1 crossposts

My take on the Tau Ceti IV Map (with an original 5-track EP)

Season 2 dropped today and the free week's pulled me back in, but honestly it's the art direction that's had me hooked since the reveal. So I spent a while building my own take on their fantastic ARG web app: an interactive 3D map of Tau Ceti IV - the colony surface as an explorable wireframe - with a 5-track EP I wrote to score it.

Curious to hear if I nailed the world aesthetic with this one - How did I do?
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Built with React Three Fiber / three.js.

Explore it: https://marathon.withseismic.com/explorer/Outpost
Original: https://tauceti.world/explorer/Outpost

Fan project, not affiliated with Bungie. Art direction inspiration goes to Kurppa Hosk. Anyway, off to have a blast!

u/beefcutlery — 1 month ago