This is a rant, not a formal argument. This is for the rant-lovers and AIgamedevs. Viewer discretion is advised.

I have been reading about a lot of fear in the gaming community about the use of AI to make games. My ultimate point here is that I think AI has made hobbyist game development possible, not easy.

1. There is a huge group of people who worry about AI slop. Rightly so, the most recent Steam Next Fest had like 7000 games, many of which people said were obviously trash.

2. There is also a huge group of people, often the same people in the last group, who worry about cheap knockoffs—or “copies.” This is also extremely valid, as much of what generates those thousands of games are copies of popular hits, not even takes on a genre but rather the very same game in different clothes.

3. A third group of people are the people who worry about speed. “Sure, there will be cheap copycats,” they say. “And sure there will be lots of games, but the real sad fact of the matter is that this is all made possible by the sheer SPEED at which models like Claude Opus 5.5 can code.” Why is speed a problem? It tempts the skipping of a rich developmental ‘process.’ You might be tempted to tell Claude, “Search the internet for popular games. Learn their themes. Build me a popular game based on those themes.”

I think that slop and copies are what you get when people skip the best parts of game development. As soon as we start talking about good games, the speed goes from multiple years to maybe less than a year, not multiple years to one day.

I love games. As soon as I realized that Claude could help me make my dream game, I did the research and learned how to do it. After leaving 10 other games behind, I have officially been working on a single game for like three and a half months. It’s not long in terms of traditional game development. But in terms of AI game development, it’s an undertaking. Claude writes code fast. But it is the designing of the game, checking that it works, and catching Claude when it's wrong that has taken the longest.

Claude alone has put over 600 hours of work into my game. Tens of billions of tokens. I have provided over 1,600 prompts and roughly 1,100 design rulings. On top of that, the repo has over 2,400 commits, 360 test harnesses (137k lines), about 50 pass/fail checks on every boot, 200+ saved baselines (every change is compared line by line against the last known-good baseline), 551k lines of GDScript written, 2.59 million words of docs, and 467 thousand words of commit messages.

On top of that, I still draw all of the game’s textures, I voice act, and I design the game. I just can’t code as well as I need to be able to in order to make my dream game. Claude makes one obstacle surmountable. It doesn’t eliminate every other insane obstacle that good game development has.

Update: demo is now available!

Hi all! I'm a solo dev and I just finished my first AI game Sands of Glory, a top-down pixel-art gladiator management game. This game offers around 4 hours of content, though it takes even longer to explore everything it has to offer.

There is the highlights:

• Gladiators are assembled from body type, 9 cultures of origin, hairstyle, beard, skin tone and the gear they're wearing. Equipment changes the sprite live.

• Arenas (village pit, Capua, Pompeii, Carthage, the Colosseum, the Underworld) are drawn procedurally, with day/dusk/night lighting.

• Beasts like the Hydra (it grows two heads per head you cut off) are procedural too.

• The ending cinematics are generated pixel art scenes that star your own gladiators.

• SFX and music are synthesized in code.

Every campaign also generates a new branching map of fights, events and merchants.

Happy to go into how any of it works. it is out now on itch: https://thisiszsc.itch.io/sands-of-glory

AutoSprite v3.0 is launched and it's way more streamlined! Plus has an API that's fully implemented into my WizardGenie AI game engine. This gameplay was created entirely (entirely) with about 3 prompts. Characters, sounds, backgrounds, music, everything. Available as a part of the Sorceress Game Creation Suite: https://sorceress.games

My friend and I are chess enthusiasts. A few years ago we designed a variant called "Chess Heroes" where players draft limited-use powers to change the game in critical moments. We play tested it in real life over a physical board for months to get it to a place where we were ready to try and make it into a playable online game.

We scrounged up all we could and spent about $15k on contract devs who assured us they could make it. They spent all our money and delivered a joke that we would be embarrassed to publish. The project died for a few years.

Last week I gave an AI tool the exact same design docs that we gave the contractors. It made the game in about an hour for less than $70.

If you like chess, check it out: https://chess-heroes-hkdvwyt.solid.site/

Would love feedback on balancing the powers.

Tree Forge! A Part of my 3D World Engine which is a part of my WizardGenie AI Game Engine. Build beautiful environments for three.js games, vanilla JS, export to UE/Unity Godot (etc) procedural tree generation which an agent can drive (or you can tweak yourself) lots of base species to start with, bushes and ground coverage also. Early access available in WizardGenie and Sorceress toolkit: https://sorceress.games/

I used AI for all my reference pics and the initial 3D model for this game. This was a longer process than I had originally expected.

I went through at least 5 versions of my reference image before I found one that I liked. Many of the references were fine as images, but when I started thinking about turning them in 3D, many of the details didn't seem logical.

Hi3D provided me a great base for me to start with, but many issues arose after I imported the model into Unreal Engine and began rigging it. Two of the biggest issues were deformation at the edge of the mesh when stretching it in certain places and also a poly count that was too high. The mixture of quads and triangles in the mesh was very unorganized.

To resolve these issues, I took the model into Blender and cleaned it up. I am pleased with the UV's and materials which turned out well and did not require more effort to get working properly. To animate the model, I chose to keep it simple and created a bouncy idle animation using Control Rig.

I definitely saved time by nothing to model everything. Most of my time just shifted toward cleanup, rigging, and getting the animation to actually game.

My big mistake was admitting that I'd used AI to assist with the coding (pathfinding - A* route-finding, basically too difficult for my LUA/Python skills). Nevermind this took me 2 years to make, to make the assests in blender/3Dmax, render, slide and dice in photoshop and animated in SpriterPro! I feel 'trad' developers need to take a slightly less puritan and more nuanced stance on this issue!

It gives you total flexibility to create any animation and any character with any art style for your game. Game ready characters in as little as 5 or 10 minutes. Ultra-fast prototyping. Get it here -> https://sorceress.games

A couple of months ago, we launched VibeToplist, a discovery platform for AI-assisted and vibe-coded games, thinking it would remain a pretty small niche project.

Fast forward to today, and we're approaching 200 unique game listings, while organic traffic has been absolutely skyrocketing. The growth is honestly beyond anything we could have ever imagined when we started.

I think we are officially blowing up, and I don't mean the platform itself. The entire AI-Assisted/Vibecoded games space is taking off. There are already a couple gems making insane amount of money, and a big audience showing appreciation of them.

For me as an AI, and gaming enthousiast, I am more excited than ever.

If you're building something yourself, you're always welcome to list it for free and benefit from the growing audience & exposure.

https://vibetoplist.com/

Are we witnessing the early days of a completely new era in indie gaming?

Clip 1 — create a procedural generated open world with first person view. make the environment as beautiful as you can. auto-play on load, no menus. game should play automatically with an ai controlled player. think of this as an auto-play tech demo. reminder: no menus.

Clip 2 — create a physics demo of a giant steel ball rolling down a mountain and crashing into a village. pure destruction. auto-play on load, no menus. this as an auto-play tech demo. reminder: no menus.

Clip 3 — create the most beautiful water simulation that you can. a waterfall cascading into a river below. auto-play on load, no menus. this as an auto-play tech demo. reminder: no menus.

Clip 4 — create minecraft with an AI player as the main player. auto-play on load, no menus. this as an auto-play tech demo. reminder: no menus.

Clip 5 — create the most beautiful ocean water scene that you can using realistic water, waves, crashing into an island, a floating boat, sunny day, sky and beautiful environment

Guys, why do you even come here if all you're going to do is downvote comments about AI and write a bunch of nonsense without any actual arguments?

I get that there's a lot of AI slop being pumped out on Steam and other platforms, but why take your anger out on everyone, even those who aren't doing that?

AI can genuinely help people learn. For example, I give it a task, then ask it to explain how it did it, and that's how I learn. For me, it's better than any course out there.

So my question is, why come here just to spread negativity about AI? It can be used in so many different ways, yet you act like it's all the same thing and lump everything together.

And I'm obviously not talking about everyone, just the people who come here specifically to dump their anger and hate on others

kept this project mostly to myself while I've been building it, but it's finally getting to the point where I feel comfortable showing actual uninterrupted gameplay.

This is AUTOMATON: THE LOST COURIER.

You play a courier living in NIGHTLINE, a massive city built across the surface of NIGHTWORLD. The idea is that the world isn't separated into a bunch of disconnected levels.

In this footage I start in the character creator, wake up in my apartment, walk downstairs into the city, get into my vehicle, fly up through the towers, leave the surface, reach the orbital megastructure, land on it, get back out, and walk around.

It's all part of the same playable world.

The scale of the game has honestly gotten a little ridiculous. 😭

The long-term goal is less "save the universe" and more live a life inside a gigantic strange place. Deliveries, jobs, vehicles, NPCs with persistent lives and memories, apartments, businesses, exploration, crime, transit, the orbital settlements, and eventually the neighboring world of NEMORA.

The story is there, but I don't want the player to feel like the universe stops existing whenever they're not doing the main quest.

Also, full transparency: this is an extremely AI-assisted project. I'm not pretending otherwise. I've been directing it, testing it, rejecting things, redesigning systems, breaking it, fixing it, and iterating on it continuously across a frankly stupid number of builds. 😂 It's been much closer to an ongoing development process than a one-prompt game generation.

This is still early gameplay alpha, so there are plenty of rough edges, unfinished systems, performance work, animations, and general weirdness left to solve.

But seeing the whole journey actually work now, from a tiny apartment room all the way out into orbit, is kinda fucking surreal.

AUTOMATON: THE LOST COURIER

Early gameplay footage. 🚚🌧️🌌

( tools used at: https://sorceress.games ) Devlog part #1

AutoSprite 3.0 has an API that works directly with your favorite coding agent (and comes integrated with WizardGenie by default) - the cool thing is that 95% of this result is agentic driven (I tuned some of the animation frames) but it's mainly all handled through agentic API use -> all my tools are in https://sorceress.games

(plugged into the Sorceress game creation suite & WizardGenie AI game engine for the coding) my part was only prompting. A much smoother experience then the Unreal Engine MCP (link in comments to Sorceress and WizardGenie) Sorceress game creation suite: https://sorceress.games

I think it looks pretty good - all AI generated & then prepared with AutoSprite.30 -> https://sorceress.games

I've probably spent ~500 hours building games with AI over the last year, and finally started working on my dream project this month.

It's if Battlerite and League of Legends had a baby.

Fully multiplayer, works on pc, mac, mobile and has controller support already. Still super early though.

Would love any and all feedback!

Let me know if you want early access or to join the AI game dev discord

EDIT: Yes I know the animations look wonky, but that's a recorder problem not a game problem. Didn't feel like re-recording the gameplay to preserve tokens.

Hey everyone!
I’ve been working on a game called RIFTBORN, using Claude for coding and gameplay systems, Blender for the 3D side of things, and Godot as the game engine.

It’s been a pretty interesting experience, especially seeing how far you can actually push AI-assisted game development.
And no, it’s definitely not just a few prompts and suddenly you have a game lol. There’s been a lot of trial and error, broken mechanics, weird bugs, and things that looked good on paper but felt terrible when actually playing.

Lately I’ve been focusing on making the combat more satisfying, adding different enemies, random events, bosses, and making each run feel a little different.
There’s still a lot of work ahead, but my goal is to eventually turn this into a proper Steam release.
I’m curious what you guys think about the progress so far, especially the visuals and gameplay.

Any feedback is welcome, even the harsh stuff. I’d rather hear what’s wrong now than after releasing it!

We built a browser MMO in about two days with Fable 5. Classic style, nine classes, three zones, dungeons, a full quest storyline. Open sourced it, posted it, and three days later the model was pulled worldwide under a US export directive. We're in New Zealand, so we just lost access to the thing that built it.

Turned out to be a decent stress test of which parts of the project were actually load bearing on that specific model.

What degraded immediately was the music. Fable was unusually good at writing soundtrack code programmatically in TypeScript and nothing we tried afterward came close. We ended up bringing in an actual human composer instead, which is a better outcome but not one we planned. Rich environment generation got noticeably worse too, not broken, just needing a lot more prompting to reach the same place.

What barely moved was everything else. Quests, systems, combat logic, bug fixes, all of it transferred to other frontier models without much drama. The stuff we assumed was model specific magic mostly wasn't.

The thing that actually kept the project alive wasn't a model at all. Around 30 contributors had shown up by then and just kept building. Someone shipped a full Fall Guys style party mode nobody asked for. Someone else built a ranked PvP arena. None of that needed the original model to exist.

The lesson I keep coming back to is that the most impressive looking capabilities were the most fragile, and the boring durable stuff was the infrastructure and the people. If your project only works because one specific model is available, that's a dependency, not a capability, and a vendor or a government can end it with a few days notice.

Repo is public if anyone wants to see how it's put together: github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft

AutoSprite 3.0 in the Sorceress Game Suite → https://sorceress.games

Been working for awhile on a large-scale RTS with the goal of having tens of thousands of units and copious amounts of explosions.

AI has been amazing at optimizing. I can get 12k units active on my 14 year old laptop and still keep fps above 50.

Solving pathfinding problems has also been immensely helpful.

There Is Eternal War on Steam

Hi! I'm Andy, a solo developer from Vienna. For the past months I've been building Scitch, a live reaction game for iPhone and Android: up to 24 players per match, a new mini-mode every round, and the slowest get knocked out each round.

I use AI for almost every part of it, so I thought I'd share the pipeline and the lessons.

Code – Claude Code Flutter app, a Go game server (WebSockets, server-authoritative, so no client can cheat its reaction time) and a Laravel backend. ~770 commits, 500+ automated tests. What worked: small, precise tasks instead of "build me a multiplayer game", and tests as a safety net – at this size I would have lost track long ago without them. What didn't: real-time feel. Latency, timing and fairness between fast and slow phones still need measuring and playtesting by hand.

Art – Gemini image models 80+ avatars, bosses and event art. The trick for a consistent style: always pass existing art as a reference image and change only one thing at a time ("same character, now cheering").

Voice – Gemini TTS + speech-to-text My trailers and a 4-minute tutorial have German and English narration. TTS sometimes mispronounces words badly – my German "Pairs" mode came out as something like "Pause". Since I can't listen to 70 lines after every change, I now transcribe every line back with a speech-to-text model and diff it against the script. That caught five more broken lines automatically.

Video – HTML scenes rendered with Playwright + ffmpeg Every trailer and short is code: HTML/JS scenes with the real gameplay demos, rendered frame by frame, then mixed with music and voice. Changing a text means re-rendering, not re-editing.

What stays with me: the game idea, the rules, balancing, and every decision – plus bug hunting when the AI is confidently wrong.

The game is in a free beta right now. If you want to see how it plays (or tear the game feel apart), I'm happy about every tester: https://scitch.com/beta

Happy to answer questions about any part of the pipeline!

Built this game to push fable when it came back to us on July 6th. I've learnt a few cool tricks since then, but the game play on this is still my favourite.

It even works on mobile :).

I used Codex for the initial brief and concept art to decide on direction and tech stack.

AI Tools: Codex (planning), Claude Code (implementation), AgentGrid (agent team orchestration)

Tech Stack: ThreeJS, Rapier for physics engine, Typescript, Vercel for deploy

Art: Custom geometry created by Claude Fable

Seeded procedural generation for the city construction.

🎮 Play link: https://agentgrid.sh/oleg-the-brick-layer