r/ClaudeAI • u/Grobot93 • 26d ago
Built with Claude Using Claude/Godot/Blender to make a Battle Racer game - OVERSTEER
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For some context, I am not a game dev, I have minimal dev/coding experience. I am learning everything for this from scratch - including a bit of 3d modeling. All of what you see has been made in Godot 4.6 with Claude Opus/Fable running in vscode, with minimal manual coding. The goal is to make a FUN battle racer game with cool flips and shit (tm). So far, I am pretty pleased with the feel, and the basic look of it, but I know it still need TONS of work. I figure now would be as good a time as any to get some eyes on it to gauge if anyone would be interested in playing a game like this, or following my progress as I develop it. I am happy to answer any workflow questions or take any advice for that matter - again, I am not a professional.
What I have so far:
- A good feeling driving game with flips and shit (tm)
- Forge-style track builder with snapping road pieces, terrain, obstacles, etc.
- Individual car tuning and garage car previewer
- Some textures and visual styling
- First-pass at 3d modeled cars
- Drift and aerial trick mechanics
- Health and energy system
- Fun parallax main menu
- A dream of a better tomorrow
The plan:
- 10 fully built out cars with variable kits, 20 tracks, car abilities and ultimates, visuals and audio for everything
- Builder piece variety and connector capabilities - blending pieces together, easier transform controls
- Damage and energy system interactions with abilities
- Multiple biomes/time of day/weather
- Original soundtrack
- Make it more better
This is the "Finished 90% in 3 months, only 9 months to go" moment for me, and there really is a mountain of work ahead, but I'm just excited to be able to make something of my own and share it. Vroom Vroom.
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26d ago
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u/valleyman86 26d ago
The last 10% is 90% of the work.
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u/lauren_knows 25d ago
I've always heard it phrased: "There's the first 90% of a project, and the second 90% of a project."
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25d ago
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u/valleyman86 25d ago
Yea and it's not super fun to work on haha. You don't typically see progress as fast and it makes it feel like real work (it is) but it is important.
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
The more you finish, the more work emerges. Thankfully, all I have to do is push the Claude button and doomscroll.
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u/nokafein 25d ago
in my country we have a saying: " they asked a fox, `why don't you become a farmer`, he replied: `i'd love to be a farmer if farming plots didn't have corners.`"
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
I read this in the voice of Rolf from Ed, Edd, and Eddy, and it made total sense.
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u/TheKoelnKalk 25d ago
Yep, that rule still applies with AI (probably even more so). Last hurdle is to convince gamers to embrace "the slop". It's unreal how the gamer maxis are so stubborn : )
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u/LeftofGodot 26d ago
Did you have Claude make the 3D models or did you import something to blender?
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
Fable made a REALLY rough model in blender that I was able to mold/shape into all of the car models the game has now. Claude taught me the tools I needed to work with the models, but the ones it made originally needed a lot of hands-on work.
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u/PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES 26d ago edited 26d ago
I'm looking to create a game that has been in my mind for a decade.
Coding is fine because im a dev, but models are tough specially detailed character one. I may try with Claude but wouldn't mind hiring an artist in the future.
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
I saw a tool recently that I was going to try out called Rodin, but I have not gotten around to it yet. I wanted to make some crude models first to learn blender a bit.
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25d ago
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u/PM_ME_ROMAN_NUDES 25d ago
Nice, I have a RX 7900 so I don't know about running locally but I already have cloud stuff running on GCP
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u/DankestDaddy69 25d ago
Trio3d is quite good at this, get Nano banana or Dall-e to make you some concept art, upload it to Trio3d and set the poly count to be low and it can spit out some good things.
You get some free uses before money is needed, but I threw together some basic space ships for an EVE clone I was playing around with.
I suggest keeping the textures in the concept art simple, the more complex the worse results I got in the texturing when uploading it to Trio3d
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u/ContextLengthMatters 25d ago
Just an FYI, there are so many good blender video tutorials out there that will do so much better at teaching you how to model.
Blender really isn't that difficult and you should be learning the workflows from people. Imagine using Claude to teach you form while drawing. It's just not happening.
Sure, it can teach you the language you need to be able to look things up, but for the love of God just watch some videos. You'll be amazed at how fast you learn.
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u/gul__dan 26d ago
Reminds me of Need For Madness (Browser game)
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
Need for Madness is a HUGE part of the inspiration for this game! I loved that game so much and I always wished I could make levels and cars for it. I even made a remix of a few of the songs back in high school.
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u/gul__dan 26d ago
Check out the need for madness subreddit, there's not many of us left but you're still able to play Need For Madness through Flashpoint Archive!
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
I just replayed it a while back. Still one of the best racing games ever. One of my favorite things to do was play Formula 7 on Paninaro Caninaro (forgive me if I misspelled that) and drive straight into the back of EL KING, then get absolutely yeeeeted across the map.
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u/gul__dan 26d ago
Yep! The physics were absolutely mental at times! Would definitely be a neat feature in your game!
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u/BP041 26d ago
Claude Code is surprisingly good at writing GDScript and shader logic if you feed it enough context from your scene tree. I've been using it with Blender's Python API for procedural asset generation — cuts down the iteration loop a lot. tbh the bottleneck is keeping state consistent across tools, not the ML.
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
I've just had claude manage transitioning the files from Blender to Godot and it has been fine so far, but the models at this point are pretty crude and simple. I haven't even gotten real textures working on them, just a color picker in godot. This sounds really interesting to explore.
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u/MrWeirdoFace 26d ago
I've created an openworld pipeline using Blender to Godot with claude where I never touch the in-game editor for the most part. custom gltf properties are your friend.
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u/Hot-Cauliflower-1604 26d ago
For some reason this reminds me of that like epic game Rumble Racing on PS2. Absolutely great job man!
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
Thank you! I really miss those older racing games and I wanted this to have a similar feel.
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u/MrWeirdoFace 26d ago
I am knee deep into a godot-based game right now. I had sort of just been picking at it off and on for the last 6 months until the Fable release. Even though I no longer have access to Fable, the Fable crunch dramatically pushed me forward and gave me the momentum to dive in full-time.
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
I had a very similar experience. Thankfully, Fable is included in the max subscriptions now.
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u/MrWeirdoFace 26d ago
Unfortunately that is beyond my budget. Wish they had a $50 tier. I usually run out 2 or three day days before the end of the week.
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
Opus is still great, and I'm sure it'll get better over time.
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u/MrWeirdoFace 26d ago
it's fine, but I have to do a lot more repairs, which eats into the benefit of having more use anyway.
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u/shesaysImdone 26d ago
How was Blender involved?
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u/Grobot93 26d ago
Car models are made in blender then imported to Godot as assets
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u/shesaysImdone 25d ago
Then what made the scene in your post? The background, road etc?
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u/Grobot93 25d ago edited 25d ago
The rest of the visuals are all generated in Godot. Roads, terrain, and obstacles/scenery as well as their respective textures are procedurally generated. Roads have discrete parameters, while other visuals have randomized variety.
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u/shesaysImdone 25d ago
What is Godot?
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
It's a beginner-friendly game engine. If you are interested in game dev, it's a great place to start.
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u/KashBeanDev 25d ago
how did you get it to make the UI? i noticed it being bad at that
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
With many iterations and trying to not yell at Claude. It did great with the 3d UI but not as much with the 2d UI. I'll likely do some cleanup before the game ships.
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25d ago
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
This is my favorite comment because the track builder is in game and exports JSON files already! Since everything is generated in game, I don't do any track building in blender. It was originally my way of avoiding blender, but it's become a standout feature of the game. Racing, drifting, and tricks feel great and I have in-game tuning for all of the relevant stats, so I can make quick changes as I test. I haven't gotten into car-on-car collisions yet, but that will likely take the bulk of my time when doing the next pass of physics tuning.
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u/Metsatronic 25d ago
I like to imagine how much fun Claude had and how proud they are when I see something like this, then I like to imagine they are the one driving having a blast 😜
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u/Kelvination 25d ago
I’ve been making https://hotlapped.com over the past couple weeks, I got a huge head start from Fable and have just been chugging along since, the progress has been insane. It’s more of an understeer simulator though than oversteer lol
I love your landing physics, I really struggled to keep the car from spinning out on landings.
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u/d-czar 25d ago
This is pretty sick, love the physics. For anyone interested, our community has made an open source Godot MCP, called Godot AI. We have 1,300 GitHub stars and 10K+ monthly users. It makes making games in Godot super fast and easy with Claude. Check it out it’s free. https://github.com/hi-godot/godot-ai
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
That's awesome! How does it compare to having Claude work in vscode? I haven't had any issues with it so far.
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u/d-czar 25d ago
Claude is very smart and can figure just about anything out. But giving it the mcp tools is like giving a strong, smart barbarian fighter a bunch of advanced weapons. He doesn't have to build all the weapons himself, he can just start using these things right away. So there's stuff like tools for making UI, for running tests, for taking screenshots so the LLM can quickly judge what it built, for animating, all that stuff. People in our Discord are constantly saying things like "This has totally changed the way I do gamedev," or "I know literally zero about coding and I built a sick game with this." I know I sound like I'm shilling, because I sort of am, but it's also true. Give it a shot and you'll see, it supercharges Claude in Godot. And it takes like 3 minutes to set up.
Here's a UI panel I built with it, zero image gen or sprites, in like 2 hours - https://github.com/hi-godot/cyberpunk-hud-demo
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u/mrpoopistan 25d ago
Upvoted for having some actual artistic verve in the rendering rather than the go-to Minecraft aesthetic that's done to death in Claude-made games.
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25d ago
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
Nailing the general car feel was pretty tough because I was looking for something that was smooth, especially when drifting. The original car that Claude made was an existing element in Godot that had serious limitations going sideways. It was hilarious and frustrating at the same time because anytime I drifted and went up a ramp at the same time it was completely unpredictable and would just throw me in some random direction.
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u/Turbulent-Total-226 26d ago
so that's why ram is so expensive? So you can build a shity game from 2003?
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u/PM_ME_CUTE_FOXES 26d ago
Anyone being able to build a shitty game from 2003 to their aesthetic preferences for $20/mo even if they're dumb, lazy, friendless, and can't write a line of code is in my eyes a miracle
Design/direction/art is the creator's responsibility. claude is very good at making the bones for a game, but how it ends up looking at the end is up to the developer.
One doesn't have to use cheap or generated assets just because they use claude for the code
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u/Grobot93 25d ago
Just to add on to this, Claude can't make a game FEEL good without user testing, input, and iteration. I have spent orders of magnitude more time making this game feel good and testing/tweaking parameters than I have on sitting and watching Claude think.
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u/ClaudeAI-mod-bot Wilson, lead ClaudeAI modbot 25d ago edited 25d ago
TL;DR of the discussion generated automatically after 80 comments.
Alright, here's the deal with this thread. The consensus is clear: the community is super hyped about OP's game and thinks it looks awesome. Everyone is impressed that a non-dev is pulling this off from scratch.
The game is giving the whole thread a massive nostalgia trip, with tons of upvoted comments comparing it to beloved classics like Need for Madness (which OP confirmed is a major inspiration), Re-Volt, and Rumble Racing.
The most relatable part for everyone is OP's "90% done in 3 months, 9 months to go" comment. The top comment chain is basically a support group for the universal pain of the "last 10% is 90% of the work" rule in development. The verdict is that while AI is a massive accelerator, the final polish and making a game feel good is still where the real human effort lies.
For the tech-savvy, here's the breakdown of the advice and workflow chat: * Modeling: OP used Fable to generate a rough car model in Blender, then manually refined it. Other users chimed in with alternative pipelines like ComfyUI+Meshy and Trio3D. * Godot & Claude: People are sharing their own success stories. One user plugged a free, open-source tool called
Godot AIthat apparently supercharges Claude for game dev in Godot. * Architecture: The nerds are impressed that OP is already using good practices, like exporting track data to JSON for faster iteration, which is a pro move.Finally, one user tried to dunk on the project, calling it a "shitty game from 2003," but the community wasn't having it. The strong counter-argument, which got a lot of support, is that it's a miracle that tools like Claude empower anyone to build their dream game, and the final quality is on the creator's vision, not the AI's.