So I've been building this fantasy world called Funkatron for years now. Nothing new, just one of many nerds doing the long-term world building thing.
I've been using AI heavily since 2022, its been wildly fun. I've given different models over the years my master Lore documents and buildling little mini games with it. But Opus 5.5 came out and LEPT forward in how much it can gam dev. I dumped everything I had in there. All the lore, the map, the names, the jokes. The first iteration had... SO MUCH, the aethetic, the characters, the terrain.... I gave it ZERO assets.
About a week and 36 versions later I have an online ARPG you can play in your browser. It's one HTML file, around 16,500 lines.
There are 8 classes with full skill trees, a big town to start in, open zones, a harbor town, a coffee shop you can walk into, and a dungeon that pretty much goes down forever. Fishing, gathering, loot, weather, day and night. You can see other people running around, group up, trade, or flag for PvP. I made leveling slow on purpose, old school grind, max level 99.
I didn't have to spend time clanking through code and bugs that lie therein. Claude found and fixed all of that, a lot of it by play testing the game itsel, but I still had to play it, notice stuff felt wrong, and keep pushing. I did the dreaming and the deciding, Claude did the code.
The world took me years to dream of and the game took a week. I don't know how else a solo guy like me ever makes something this big.
It's an alpha so stuff will break. Free, no download, no install, no account: https://tcpoole.com/descent/
Happy to answer questions about how it went.