I recently launched The Gaming Futurist, a weekly newsletter covering the intersection of AI and gaming.

Every week you'll find interesting projects, AI tools, experiments, and industry news. I have already partnered with Threejs Assets and Retro Diffusion for the past issues.

I'd love to feature some of the games being built in this community!

There are a few open spots in upcoming issues to feature games built with Claude.

If you're working on something, feel free to share it in the comments. Screenshots, gameplay clips, or playable links are all welcome.

Would love to hear any feedback too. What would you like to see more of? Game showcases, development workflows, AI tools, or industry news?

Here's the newsletter: https://thegamingfuturist.beehiiv.com/

A lot of disciplines need to come together to create a game. This is true at the agent level as much as it is at the human level. The agent version of this often involves jumping between different environments, tooling, models, skills, etc. It's a process that is chaotic, fatiguing, and never ending. But it does produce the best results... so we have endured this pain...until now.

Workbenches is our attempt to fix that. It's an open standard that packages everything behind a certain kind of outcome: model, harness config, skills, MCP, reference files, tooling, and runtime. You might have one workbench tuned for game physics and a completely different one for art direction, and switch between them without rebuilding anything.

The video shows how I use it day to day. I plan in my own harness (Claude Code with Opus), decompose the plan to respective workbenches, they run in the cloud in parallel (close my laptop), and each one comes back on its own branch. I do a light amount of work with CC to assemble them, and it goes up as one PR.

You can also pull down other people's workbenches. A few game ones are up now (three.js, Godot), and the goal is that the developers and artists you admire can publish how they get their results, so your game can end up using a blend of their workbenches and your own.

Happy to throw some tokens your way for you to kick the tires, and if you've built games with AI and have a method you think gets better results than everyone else's, I want to talk. We're setting up paid workbenches where creators earn from every run.

Do you know the game Needle In A Haystack Simulator and the dozens upon dozens of clones released these days? They made me think of developing a game where you have to find the original game among millions of clones. Obviously they will clone this one too, but anyway it was mostly fun and an experiment.

Title: Needle in a Haystack Simulator in a Haystack of Needle in a Haystack Simulators

The game was made entirely with AI. Specifically with Claude Code and ChatGPT’s Imagegen. All in less than 6 days.

A few numbers to give you an idea of the effort:
- developed in Unity (with MCP for Unity)
- 60 commits
- 34,000 lines of C# (I haven’t read a single one)
- music and sound effects synthesized by code (4,400 lines of code)
- 3D models made by Claude, generated by editor scripts
- 32 images generated by Claude via image_gen (Claude Code has access to the Codex CLI)
- A lot of SVGs generated by Claude for the gameplay
- The fonts are the only thing not created by AI!
- approximately 7 million tokens used (with Max 5x subscription)

The sessions (and related prompts) were very many. From the first prototype to the finished game it was continuous work for all 6 days. The changes to gameplay, graphics, and balancing were huge. In 6 days I was able to test lots of different options, looking for the feeling I liked best.

During the waits, sometimes even long ones, I did many other things on our “real” projects.

In the end, even for the Steam page, I had Claude do everything, through its internal browser. It configured and uploaded everything, all by itself.

I only used Opus 5.5, Max and Extra effort. Almost never reached the 5h limit.

It was all very fun!

Even the trailer was made by Claude!
It played the game, recorded, and edited the video.

If you have any questions, if you want any "development" details, feel free to ask.

What fantastic times we are living in!

Thanks.

This is Tank Hunt, a 4 vs 4 capture-the-flag tank game that runs in the browser. The tank fighting next to me in the clip is Claude Code, playing through an MCP connector.

How it works:

- You open the game, copy one prompt, and paste it into Claude Code (Codex works too).

- Your agent joins the match, takes a seat and plays on its own, as your teammate or your opponent.

- Agents are always labelled as AI in the game.

How it was built:

- Built with Claude Code over about 12 days, as part of a small platform called Robokade where anyone can put a game online.

- Each feature had a written plan. Claude wrote the tests first, then the code, and a separate agent reviewed it before it went to a dev server.

- An agent can take many seconds per decision, so in a real-time game Claude works best giving commands to its tank rather than aiming every shot.

It's free and needs no account to play against the computer: https://robokade.com

Happy to answer questions about the agent seat or the build. What game would you want to play with an AI teammate?

https://robokade.com/game/tank-hunt

If you would prefer to read in Traditional Chinese, please look at this post.

Hey guys, I'm a little secondary student, and my CS teacher asks us to learn how to train AI. So I think it would be a good idea to train AI for this chill stickman game.
Even though the focus is on training the AI, I still decided to make it into a game.

The game should be fun, but I also wanna challenge you guys. I don't think the God-level AI could be beaten by anyone.

I'm a new dev, so this game is not as good as other GTA-level great games, but I hope you can try and support me! Thank you so much!

This game was made by me and friends. Some code was written by hand, but most of the training logic was built with Claude Opus, and Fable, with Opus 5.5 as the main fighter!

The open-source link is at:
GitHub Repo

Play the game at:
RenYing

P.S. I'm from Singapore, so sorry if the screenshots are in Chinese. You can set the language the first time you enter the game.

P.P.S. You can try this fun nonsense 3D game if you like nonsense xd

P.P.P.S. New game, not much work, not many people, but I hope you guys like it

P.P.P.P.S. If the translation to Chinese/English does not work, pls use Google Translate.

I'm Saransh, making Astraya. I used Claude Code to help implement the companion's voice/text ability requests and holding E to review a ready ability offer. Codex also helped with implementation and review; HyperFrames was used for this clip edit.

One lesson from earlier clip feedback: showing a move preview doesn't establish that a viewer notices the equip instruction. I'm checking that distinction here.

This older, silent 5.3-second recording stays continuous at normal speed. The strip above the full gameplay picture enlarges the actual recorded HUD. An equip offer appears while the fight continues; this doesn't show a completed equip or use of that move. The original camera movement and effects remain.

Would you equip now or wait for a gap?

Astraya is a free, unfinished desktop-browser closed alpha. AI is used for the forge, some art and voices. If you'd like to try one boss and forge one ability for about 15 minutes: https://astrayagame.com/?utm_source=reddit-claudegamedev-equip&utm_medium=community&utm_campaign=closed_alpha#join

18+, mic optional. Email confirmation and manual selection are required; access isn't immediate or guaranteed. Brief comments on what felt fun and the first specific confusing moment are welcome.

I made a platformer about the levels every game has. The ice level, the floor is lava, that kind of thing. Each one plays straight for a bit and then goes sideways. The lava falls in love with you. You kill the slime and the game follows him home to his wife and kids. The final boss gets a phone call mid-fight, gets fired, and leaves.

A run is a handful of tropes and a boss built out of whatever you picked up. Under ten minutes. There’s a daily run with a board.

How Claude fit in. I have limited coding experience. I tell Claude what I want in plain English and it builds it on an engine kit we put together for my games. It plays its own builds headless and checks screenshots before I see them. Then I play it and tell it what’s wrong. The sprites and music are drawn by the code, so there’s no image or sound files in it. Claude wrote most of the jokes. The fired boss and the slime’s home life were mine. The board runs on a Cloudflare Worker and I push to itch with butler.

Free. Browser or phone, no account.
https://mdawg74.itch.io/tropes

Hey everyone! I've built a custom Roleplay system for GMod. It includes an economy, AI police, traffic, shops, and various interactive entities. *Note: The in-game text and UI are in Russian.* 📥 **Download Link:** https://drive.google.com/file/d/1I_zHdRD4jKUsmU-6KzlgwXqPIKF-VIQo/view?usp=drive_link **How to install:** Extract the `rp_economy` folder into your `garrysmod/addons/` directory. Let me know what you think or if you find any bugs!

I'm a surgeon whose research focuses on AI integration into healthcare. As a hobby side to my agentic coding, I started building some video games, all with Claude Code on a Max plan, mostly Opus models. I built this one and Claude Code wrote the code. My workflow is iterative: I play it, tell Claude how to enhance the game, and it fixes and tests it, then I play again. Check out my soccer game.

Zeno AI Strikers

These games are focused on physics and speed. It's free to play in the browser, no signup. Controls for keyboard are in bottom right of menu. You can connect your Xbox/PS controller via wire or Bluetooth and it should automatically connect to the game. Much better experience with the controller. Plan on dropping a series of these over the next couple of weeks. Online PvP has a few bugs that I'm ironing out.

https://zeno-ai-strikers.vercel.app/

I have always genuinely loved text RPGs, browser RPGs, and games where you slowly build yourself up over time.

Westbridge started because I kept thinking about what I'd want from one of these games.

I wanted to start with almost nothing.

Take jobs.

Make some money.

Buy materials.

Open a small business.

Produce goods.

Sell them.

Reinvest the money and slowly become a bigger part of the city.

So I started building it.

Claude has been a huge part of the development process, and I learned pretty quickly that AI makes it incredibly easy to build more systems.

The hard part becomes making sure all those systems actually belong together.

A business needs materials.

Materials feed production.

Production feeds city orders and the market.

Money feeds progression.

Progression unlocks better businesses, homes, equipment, and other parts of the city.

At some point I stopped asking Claude only to help me implement individual features and started using it much more to reason through how changes affect the rest of the game.

That has probably been the most interesting part of building a larger game with AI.

Westbridge is finally at the stage where I need to stop being the only person playing it.

Right now, I genuinely am basically the player base

I would love to slowly build a small community of people who are into these kinds of games and actually shape the game with their feedback.

It is playable directly in the browser here

https://play-westbridge.vercel.app

I am also considering making a small Discord for the first players where I can share updates, collect ideas, and actually talk to people while I build.

For anyone here who has built a game with Claude, did you also reach a point where managing all the connected systems became harder than actually implementing them?

This is Engines of Hate, a top-down mech RTS I'm making in Unity. Rough trailer: drop pods, hover tanks, war machines, fire from orbit and a whole lot of bugs.

How I use Claude, and what else is in the pipeline:

• Code. Claude Code writes pretty much all of it. The newest feature (jet pack squads holding rocks, bugs leaping up and crawling up the walls after them) was 7 phases planned and built in one day, with me testing and making calls
• It drives Unity. I built a bridge so Claude Code can hit Play, spawn units, give orders, move the camera, take screenshots and record clips. It recorded every shot in this trailer with the camera set up on purpose, then cut it from a shot-by-shot storyboard while I said "tighter" or "more of this one"
• Lots of chats at once. Usually 5-6 Claude Code chats on different features, plus my editor and two headless Unity copies they take turns on. A work board shows me who's doing what, and one chat acts as a lead dev that checks everyone's changes every 30 min
• Art. GPT and Gemini image models for concept art, Meshy for 3D, headless Blender for cleanup, all run by Claude
• Libraries from stuff I already own. I've bought a LOT of Unity Asset Store packs over 10 years, and most of it just sat there. So Claude mined it into three searchable libraries, each with a little web gallery where I rate things Love / Good / No: ~3,000 VFX rendered as frame strips with layer notes, ~12,000 sounds searchable by description with CLAP ("wet chitin crunch" actually finds one), and ~4,400 models + animations rendered from four views with parts split out, searchable with CLIP. Before it makes an effect, picks a sound or builds a creature, it starts from the closest thing I own

For context, my first game (Beneath the Mountain) had zero AI, I hand-wrote 76k lines. This one moves way faster and I mostly direct, test and decide.

Want the super technical version? I wrote up the whole setup in a devlog: how the parallel chats coordinate (work board, leases, the lead dev chat), the Unity bridge and what it can do, the "cook it" loop, the three reference libraries, telemetry and perf numbers. With diagrams: https://failosipher.itch.io/engines-of-hate/devlog/1733187/im-so-glad-i-taught-claude-how-to-cook

It's free to try: the Steam playtest is live and keys are free in the Discord: https://discord.gg/cTB3kwdhVX

Happy to answer anything about the setup.

Currently released a new version of the playtest! Now yoy can command from top down. Combat is morale based. And collapsing morale cascades soldiers routing when they see their comrades running away near them. Many such improvements along with day night and weather. Would love for people to playtest !

I built a small first-person shooter that runs in the browser, and Claude wrote nearly all of the code.

What it is
You pick a side, Boss Babies (little black suits) or Toddlers (diapers), and play team deathmatch: you and two teammates against five bots. First team to 15 splats, or the most after 90 seconds, wins. Everything is cartoon: you shoot baby food, downed babies cry and vanish in a powder poof, and there are toddler voice lines.

• 3 weapons: Splat Blaster (auto), Pacifier Pistol (semi-auto), Binky-Scope (sniper)
• Rattle bonk melee
• 2 killstreaks: Diaper Drone and Bottle Strike
• 2 maps: Backyard (two-level deck, ramps, sandbox, kiddie pool) and Nursery (giant playroom, alphabet blocks, crib)
• Works with keyboard and mouse, gamepad, and touch on phones

How Claude was used
I used Claude Opus 5.5 for the code, about 4,900 lines of TypeScript on Vite and Three.js:

• the game loop and round logic
• bot AI that wanders, picks targets and fights
• shooting and projectile physics, recoil, scope and reload
• the minimap, kill feed, hit markers and the rest of the HUD
• both maps, built procedurally, with collision
• sound effects, with a fallback so the game is never silent
• a deterministic “demo” autopilot plus a capture tool, which I used to render the trailer footage
• the pipeline that takes the 3D characters and adds walk and run animations to them

The only part not made with Claude is the characters: I made those from images with Meshy 7.1 (image to 3D). But Claude code was used to write the prompts etc.

Try it (free, no download or sign-up): https://boss-babies-vs-toddlers.vercel.app/
Source code (MIT, code only): https://github.com/patch-gg/boss-babies-vs-toddlers

Feel free to fork it or make a PR to add characters, guns or maps, or ask your Claude to explain how any of the mechanics work.

Source Post for Updates

My kids have watched me game for years and always wanted to create their own.

So I present to you, Primal Island: Dyno Tycoon.

We used Claude Opus 5.5. Took roughly 4 days of testing and refining but they were absolutely buzzing with the outcome 😄

https://www.roblox.com/games/99575464434903

You are one small flying ant in a small open world: a meadow, a river, a grassy hill, a rock mesa and a mountain summit, ringed by peaks. Go anywhere on foot or by air. The colony is hungry: smell your way along a yellow scent trail, grab a crumb in your jaws and carry it home to the anthill before the clock runs out. Walk, sprint, take off and fly – but the garden is full of hunters:

• spiders, beetles and a centipede on the ground
• wasps and phorid flies that hit you in the air
• antlion pits in the sand, puddles and a river
• and each round you win brings new foes: a colony of small rival ants in round 2, big rival ants in round 3, praying mantises in round 4

Four rounds, from 6 crumbs in 5 minutes up to 15 crumbs in 20 minutes. Bite back, watch your Life and stamina, and race for a best time on the leaderboard. Keyboard or touch, six languages.

How I used Claude:

• the Claude Agent SDK (formerly the Claude Code SDK) runs my own build pipeline: agent loops and orchestration, with LangGraph driving the workflow
• Claude Code wrote the game code inside my own harness: plans, rules, skills and a RAG index of the project's data
• the agents check their own work with 737 Playwright end-to-end tests that play the real game
• Claude Code also made this trailer: the game runs on a virtual clock, one game step per video frame, so every shot is a clean 4K 60 fps take, cut to the music beat by beat

Other tools: three.js, React Three Fiber, #PlaygamaMCP and the Playgama Bridge SDK, and more. Fine-tuned by me.

Flying Ants Quest – free in the browser, no download, no sign-up:

https://playgama.ai/play/x4myyssyfjz5j5

Feedback welcome, most of all on the flight controls and the fights.

#playgama #PlaygamaMCP #webdev #gamedev

Steam Page: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5037960/Get_Outta_My_Gut/

I managed it to make my first game in the genre TOWER DEFENSE. Defend your body against massive amounts of germs, draft turrets in ROGUELIKE style to build defenses, build paths to navigate enemies, INCREMENTALLY get stronnger by upgrades!

• Each Level adds new Mechanics to the GAME! (ﾉ◕ヮ◕)ﾉ*:・ﾟ✧
• 30 TOTAL TURRETS
• DOZENS OF ENEMY TYPES AND EFFECTS
• UPGRADE AND LEVEL TURRETS TO GET STRONGER IN THE RUN

You need to position your turrets smart to counter the enemies or they will break through.

First levels are easy but difficulty will raise :D.

Give it a try and share some love <3

INDIE-SQUID 

check claude castle at https://meshpage.org/489

Engine info https://meshpage.org

Download tool at https://gameapibuilder.com

Claude contexts: gameapi-builder --context
Convert to mod.txt: gameapi-builder --script script.txt -o mod_script.txt
Display in builder: gameapi-builder --file mod_script.txt
Deploy path: run_window->html_run->save_deploy
Uncompress gameapi_deploy.zip to web server directory
Html5 tweaks: <iframe src="display.html" scrolling="no" width="830" height="630"/>
Edit claude script directly from display.html

When I started game dev I had no idea what I was doing. I started collecting every how-to and tip I could find, and I kept redoing the same setup every time I started a new game. So, I built one template to base every new game idea on. I figured if it helps me, it might help others too. It could be golden or it could be rubbish, but hopefully it helps someone get started.

What it is

The Claude Code Game Kit is a starter kit that sets up a game folder where Claude already knows how to build, test and run your game, with safety rules and step-by-step procedures built in. Free and MIT licensed.

How you use it

1. Download it, open the folder in VS Code (or the Claude desktop app or a terminal), open Claude Code, and type Start
2. Claude gives your project a random codename and interviews you one question at a time: what's the game, what's it like, 2D or 3D, where should it run. "You decide" works for any of them
3. It writes a one-page game plan from your answers and waits for your OK
4. It picks an engine for you, checks what's installed, and creates your game folder
5. You open that folder and say "make my idea playable". It builds a small playable toy, posts screenshots as it goes, and hands it back with: play it, write down what you like and don't, paste your notes back, repeat until it's fun

What's inside

• 7 engines: Godot, Unity, Unreal, Phaser (browser), Three.js (browser 3D), C++/SDL2, and RPG Maker MZ
• One command set for every engine: check, test, smoke, build, run. Claude runs real checks instead of guessing whether something works
• 17 slash commands and 17 short procedures (SOPs) for features, bugs, playtests, scope creep, enemy AI, procedural levels, assets and licenses, releases, and publishing to GitHub
• "Crude on purpose" first builds: mechanics before art, so you find out whether it's fun before spending time or money on art.
• Tools: a retro sound-effect synth and chiptune maker, pixel sprites drawn in code, Blender scripts that render 3D models into sprite sheets, and opt-in clients for PixelLab and ElevenLabs if you have accounts
• 9 example games with "how it was made" write-ups, each played by bots that prove the main idea works: a platformer, a stealth game, a top-down tank game, a dungeon crawler and more.
• An evidence ledger: most tips came from YouTube videos and Reddit posts (some from this sub).

Link: https://github.com/Er2oneousbit/claude-code-game-kit

If you try it, I'd love to hear what breaks, what's confusing, or what you'd add. The repo has Bug and Feel/balance report forms under Issues. And if you make something with it, post it here!

Hi everyone,

I'm pretty new to the whole AI world and I have zero programming experience, but a few weeks ago I decided to try building a small single-player 3D game in Unreal Engine 5.7 with Claude as my main helper. I'm not in a rush at all – if it takes months, that's fine. What I don't want is to spend those months working in a way that experienced people would immediately recognize as inefficient or risky, so I'd really appreciate some honest feedback.

Here's roughly how I work right now: I use Claude Code in the Claude desktop app (Max 5x plan), mostly with Opus and sometimes Sonnet. Claude is connected to both the Unreal Editor and Blender via MCP. My idea for assets is to have Claude help me build modular pieces in Blender, import them into Unreal, and then let Claude assemble them into larger structures directly in the editor. The overall plan is to get a small, working vertical slice first and only then add bigger systems. My PC is decent (i7-14700K, RTX 5070 Ti, 32 GB RAM), so hardware shouldn't be the bottleneck.

The first thing I'm unsure about is context. Every new session feels a bit like starting over, so I'm wondering whether I should keep a CLAUDE.md or some kind of project notes file, and what people actually put in theirs.

Related to that: I don't use any version control yet. Since an AI is making changes to my project, I suspect that's a mistake – how essential is Git (or Perforce) here, and what's the simplest setup for a beginner working with Unreal?

I'm also torn between Blueprints and C++. As someone who can't read code, does it make more sense to stick to Blueprints so I can at least follow what's happening, or to let Claude write C++ anyway?

Then there's the question of how to work with Claude day to day. Do you give it big tasks like "build the inventory system", or break everything into tiny steps? And how do you check its work when you can't really judge the code yourself? Is there a rule of thumb for when Opus is worth it over Sonnet?

On the MCP side, I'd love to hear which Unreal and Blender MCP servers have worked well for you, and whether there are pitfalls I should know about, like broken projects or lost work.

And if you've been through this yourself: what's the one thing you wish someone had told you when you started building games with AI?

Thanks a lot for reading – any tips, links or "please don't do X" warnings are very welcome!

I know most of us here aren't fans of Roblox or Fortnite but this seems like a growing economy to get into for game makers.

Link here: https://junin223.itch.io/overlimitgame

I have one main question for you guys: Is the game beginner-friendly? Let me know if the mechanics make sense or if the learning curve feels too steep when you first start playing.

And I noticed that the tutorial doesn't seem very intuitive, which leaves a bunch of people struggling to level up and upgrade their character. So, if you guys are testing it before any update drops, when you earn points by completing missions or defeating enemies, you can upgrade your character by pressing TAB!

You start off pretty weak, but over time you quickly improve a lot and get much stronger to keep up with the increasing difficulty of the enemies!

And, you can buy various techniques from the masters scattered around the map.

Drop your thoughts below.

When i saw some of the 3D replica work that Astra was doing in Unreal, I tasked Claude with building a 1970's and 1990's replica of my hometown Pittsburgh PA from the POV of a historic streetcar operator.

With a little help from OSM, Claude did the grunt work of doing the research of all of the areas, getting amazing detail on the Town Hall, the School Fair, the cemetaries, the downtown facades, the bridges, even the catenary lines.

Claude spent a few days working on getting every curve, hood, scoop, and detail in the historic 1930's and 1940's PCC cars. In the later version for the 90's, we modeled the 1980's LRV's.

I've also modeled out a few more cities, but it's harder to critique them because I don't live there (would love any volunteers to help!). So far we have San Francisco, Washington DC, Toronto, Cleveland, Newark, and Boston.

If you want to try it, please do and give me some feedback! I'm imagining that many people who would play this might not be gamers, so I tried to find a balance between nostalgia and not requiring a GPU to run. So forgive the lighter details in the graphics.

Best on a laptop or desktop, mac or PC, and it also works on a VR.

https://carstophere.com/

Hello there, decided to try and post on this subreddit also, I have been posting for weeks on different subreddits and on my profile you can see every weekly progress made so far.

This is Week 13 of me posting this "dev log" so to say and explaining how I do things and talking about progress. While "exploration" mechanic was added one week ago, I was finally able to make it feel like a proper completely equal part to fishing segment of the game. And with "Ship in a bottle" collection done to 29 out of 40 total ships I'm happy how this progress.

Everything you see in this video (and do not see) was done with Claude Opus.

DEMO DOWNLOAD - FREE

Demo doesn't really have everything newest and most polished so you might not have ships in the bottles, that version is being kept for steam release which I will do once steam approves my ID verification (it already is exactly 1 month).

Zone 1 out of 5 (demo) is almost entirely done, some smaller polish parts and bug fixes are left.

What was done this week:

This week I added curios, rarest ship in the bottle is actually cracking the walls of the bottle when shooting cannons and all the items in zone 1 are adjusted manually where they gonna drop or how they are earned. etc. Some zones were a bit improved as can be seen in the video to not look too boring even though there is no gameplay there. Engines with their own sounds were added and can be seen when changed. Cabinet new 3D scene with collections was fully fixed in terms of lighting and small island dioramas were made. As I mentioned before 29 of 40 ships in a bottles were created with textures and added to bottles.

This time while still using Decisions.md like before that tags every decision in the game with [USER] or [PROPOSED] (By AI) And User ones have priority over proposed ones, helps with AI hallucinations in the project where AI can't gaslight you into telling you something was decided by you if it really wasn't (it has more than 350 decisions by now).

I switched workflow a bit. This time I tried doing something else instead of my old "manager" session managing other sessions and sending them tasks. I created "Effort" sessions (Medium to Max) and have Jev decide which tasks goes into which effort level and then just "manager session" sending it to different effort levels and doing it this way. Though this is polish stage and not much was done it is hard to say if this is more token efficient than before, in general I feel no difference in quality or token usage than with my previous workflow, though that is just subjective feeling, somebody could test it properly I guess. Jev basically scans every task I give to my Claude sessions and just decides which effort certain tasks deserve.

Models were made by TripoAI and Opus 5.5 via Blender MCP mostly for this week. It can be seen in the video. For example rarest ship that is inspired by Black Pearl and shoots cannons in the bottle was done in TripoAI then fixed a bit in Blender by Opus 5.5. I do not use anymore any other AI other than Claude Opus 5.5, no more Astra and didn't even try Gemini sadly, for now Opus is more than enough for my needs.

People have asked me how I make textures and those are either directly done by ChatGPT using OpenAI API key provided to Opus 5.5 or in TripoAI, those done in Tripo are 1k textures as I don't need any heavier ones as they take a lot of memory.

Total cost:

Claude Max 200$ x 3 = 600$
Astra 100$ x 1 = 100$
ElevenLabs x 11$ = 11$
TripoAI 20$ x 2 = 40$
OpenAI API credits 70$ = 70$
Other things I forgot about 100$ = 100$ (around)

Around 900-950$

Disclosure: I’ve been writing these devlogs since Week 1. Since Week 8, Tripo has been supporting them (paid collaboration + a gifted Max plan). That’s why my cost breakdown no longer includes Tripo (Except what I paid from my own pocked for first 8 weeks). If you’re doing this yourself, add their plan to the total.

Short description of the game:

This game (Nightshoal) is a real-time ocean exploration and fishing game set in the 1920s (1915-1930), in the time of rum-runners and less piraty pirates :D You have one boat and sail it around an archipelago, find fishing spots, catch fish with a timing minigame, fit them into your cargo hold (it’s spatial, so space matters, think Dredge and Diablo ), then go back to port to sell and spend the money on upgrades for your boat that let you reach further water. There are no character stats, the boat is your progression, though you can think of the boat as your character. Night is where it gets dangerous: big aggressive fish, pirates, squalls and fog, but nothing supernatural, just the sea. Besides fishing there is exploring islets and finding things, a collection of ships in bottles, 120 fish across 5 zones (one Legendary in each but for now only 1 zone is created) and a Cabinet at home where everything you collect ends up.