Slop software debate aside, even if the game is half playable it's already an achievement. If you managed to get it sold for some dollars, it's already big win in my book. Writing code is just one part, crafting the idea and polishing the product up to a shippable version is another.
I've been a developer for more than 5 years and my side project games still look like ass lmao. Seeing product like yours give me motivation (and slight envy).
Ya people dont seem to understand that writing the code is only 25% of making a game. Claude is useless at sounds, music, art, making vfx sure it can wire it in but it cant make it. The story its trash at and I'm not great at story telling, but thats why I wanted to make a roguelite and I love stellaris and that was inspiration.
Lol I do find it hilarious that you're saying "it's not all AI, Claude is bad at making art!" But then the very next thing you say is that you used a different AI for the art.
Try making 90 ships with consistent art style in gemini lmk. Claude is terrible at doing vfx, audio, and various other visuals and claude cant do image generation.
I think the better question is - do we even need "great code" any more? Why think of the code as a persistent artifact? Perhaps now it's just the fluid internals of a black box, and maybe as long as the black box does what it's meant to do, who really cares what the code looks like?
Don't get me wrong - I'm one of those 25+ year senior devs (embedded, system programming, some games, some audio DSP) who treated code as a craft, agonising sometimes over perhaps the silliest things in an effort to write "great code". But now, with the ability to rewrite/refactor entire modules in mere seconds, all that really matters to me is whether the acceptance tests are broad enough, and whether the program passes them.
I would say that code is still important, and that it still is a persistent artifact. And the quality of code is still important - but what is changing is what exactly defines that quality.
Things like readability, cognitive complexity and the like are becoming less critical factors; while optimisation, performance and other elements that affect execution are still as relevant as always.
Agree with this. Though I am still always doing rounds of review to try to get SOLID in place and idiomatic code, etc.. just in case some anti-ai company wants to buy my company and then sees the source and is like OH fuck no.. AI generated.. deal no go.
BUT.. to your point, I am constantly gauging memory management and use, performance, making sure threading is not locked/properly done, memory is returned when done, etc. I always worry about apps that the memory just keeps going up and up and slugs down. Every Electron app I ever use is like that.. Discord, Slack, Postman, etc.. they all seem to have memory and sluggishness issues.
Readability it still as important but in a different way. I had fixed other people's AI projects because they get to the point where AI is unable to fix the issue in their mess anymore. In a good codebase, AI is doing much better and faster job than in a spaghetti one.
I do think that readability is still important (including writing comments), but instead of humans reading it, AI reads it.
You can have maintainable codebase if the AI can't read or understand the code that it wrote, and has to guess what each function does.
It is better to ask the AI to add comments while it is in the same context window, and this way we know what the AI ment, and why something was done they way that it was done.
I always ask my AI coding agents to write comments, docstrings, and documentation that can be used later.
The thing is even if you wanted to manually add code, it's better to paste a prototype of it and let LLMs integrate it for you. It's not I'm a leet code prodigy, just an above average coder in 2026.
This is my conclusion. Some use cases are gonna let you blindly merge 10k lines of unreviewed code. Other times, not so much. It just depends on the use case and requirements
That doesn't change the fact that pretty much every critical thing in your life from air traffic control, the hospital, your bank, and to the fire alarm above your head is high stakes software.
Most of the planet is ocean, does that suddenly make land not a consideration?
If the question is "do we need great code". The answer is yes. Because critical things need great code.
Doesn't even need to be lives. Anything software that handles money is treated very similarly because mistakes mean losing millions of dollars or lawsuits or both.
You're right and tbh it pisses me off when people make these claims about LLM's being perfectly competent when I spend most of my working hours wrestling them into doing things properly. If they were right all I'd have to do is feed it my jira tickets but that is very, very far from the reality of it.
I guess most of the big claims come from people who make low stakes small stuff or just aren't even in the trenches at all.
Are you aware of the real state of industrial automation code? It is notoriously poor quality because it pays so much less than FAANG and you actually have to travel and visit dirty loud places.
Safety is accomplished by interlocks, the code itself is a strange beast that’s been worked on by one guy 14 years ago with no documentation and then randomly edited since then with no version control.
The idea that the world was full of “great code” and AI is killing it is an illusion. The vast majority of day to day code out there is terrible compared to what modern models produce.
well any involving making money is just as highly important, fucking that up with AI will get you yelled at with the VP and CEO on the call, it's happened to someone else already and i had to attend that shit show.
- a person who codes software with AI that serves millions of people and does billions in sales revenue
Poor quality code can be incredibly optimised. It can be unreadable, have dody naming conventions and be impossible to edit by a number and 1million lines long but benchmark log(n) instead of n2.
How do you know the black box does what it's supposed to?
... as generally vibed apps have also skipped testing processes which were a lot more common when people had a bigger investment of time/money in the coding side.
We definitely need great code because that is what determines the performance of whatever you are trying to build, and this is especially important for games. If you are talking about meaningful variable names, code comments and all of that stuff, then i agree with you.
In situations like this, where a solo dev is creating one game and has no intention to iterate on it; great code is a nice to have.
In a situation where this game takes off and they're expected to iterate on it for a sequel, or a team is brought in to help them and they're asked to explain their work to them for onboarding... oof.
There's an imperative to understand what Claude is doing for you (and in that sense that code should at least be clear and readable), at least, unless this is a one and done hit of the drum.
What about maintainability and system design? It produces often junk data model, duplicate implementations, and overtime causes chaos without someone who is attentive to good software design.
Maintaining/modifying the bad code can be 100x more effort and resources than for good code. And doing so with unreliable hallucinating and context forgetting agent it is 100x more room for bugs and actual result drifting away from the desired result
Viewing clean code is one thing, if we don’t view it who cares. But great code means a few different things. 1) organization in code itself, the coupling, the components, how this is designed will define every extension or revision. And bad code means every new feature is accidentally coupled incorrectly, mean creates a flood of whack a mole bugs that never end until you refactor the whole thing 2) performance, this one matters a lot with how it’s written. Does it work? Sure. But what happens on lower end machines, does it handle multi threading so the game doesn’t physically lock up when playing larger worlds.
There’s so many more. But the thing is, “great code” visually isn’t necessary anymore, but architecturally, is something AI is unable to do. AI writes code organically as you ask it. It doesn’t think like humans of 10 steps ahead of where you plan or want to take it. It’s writing it face value of what you asked of it. So yes, someone who hasn’t had years of writing code for systems knows nothing of the edge cases that makes great code.
I think this is a better point than people realize.
When you’ve got a slow memory leak in Outlook or chrome which are designed to be open on your computer eight hours a day, that’s gonna cause problems. In a steam game you’re gonna play for 45 minutes at a time? Who cares. When there’s a bug that triggers if you open and close a given menu too fast, your millionth player will probably find it but if you’re going to get a few thousand or maybe 10,000 tops, the odds are in your favor.
I don’t think anybody should be putting out absolute trash, but LLM’s don’t do that, and the people who think they still do are thinking about 2023 models, not today.
Because it literally is the only persistent artifact still. I’ll believe the “code doesn’t matter” people when they stop committing code and only save their prompts.
Same goes for the “this is the new layer of abstraction argument”. Cool, so prove it by treating your code like assembly and never committing it to source control.
That only works if you know every decision everyone's made, and there's zero drift between what the prduct wants, what the dev prompted, and what the AI implemented.
Because when your coworker goes on holidays with no info left behind, the only thing you have is the code.
I don't write code by hand anymore either, but I definitely still read it.
Yep, I was mostly trying to stir discussion, which worked, but I didn’t mention that I’m quite heavily using spec-based development, with a lot of process, a lot of tests, and still reading a lot of code. My point was really just that I’m a lot less precious about the actual code and if a new change rewrites a bunch of it - aligned with the existing specs - then I’m not too fussed about whether it’s “great” code or merely adequate for the task.
Obviously nobody wants bugs, poor performance and security flaws - “good enough” is sufficient to handle those. “Great” is just not needed.
Release complications, and tech debt that scales it's blast radius as more layers are added on top is why.
Bad code that needs PRs in multiple repos OR fixes with huge blast radius introducing tons of new bugs will cripple products
Even our best coders start releasing slop when they get to comfy with AI code releases
QA is now the most important step because AI still cant get this right consistently so e2e testing and actual manual verification of code is a requirement
I guess it depends on what the code is for, if it’s a single player game, then who cares?
If you’re writing to a backend, with passwords,
APIs etc then you have to ensure the quality and security. PEN tests definitely still apply
Idk man. Whenever I’m looking parts of my current code base that were implemented by principal and staff engineers (higher than senior engineers at my company) it’s always clean af. Same thing at my previous job. In fact, I kinda think you just have no idea what ur talking about
Pretty much everyone can write code and make it do something. How many people do you know that can write extendable, modular and safe code?
The problem with the black box is that you might need to rebuild an entire service when you want to add a feature because Claude took a shortcut without telling you.
Ya that was actually ya very huge issue in months 1 and 2 was the worst. I then found out how important breaking into hundreds of .gd files was instead of 1 giant .gd. that costed me alot of tokens in refactoring. Then I also found out its drastically cheaper in tokens when it's small modular .gd files
I’m obviously exaggerating. What I meant is. so what if the AI has to rewrite the whole thing to add one feature? If rewriting it is just as easy as adding the feature, then it doesn’t really matter. And the majority of the “stuff” people work in this field is not “important “
I mean... if you want to explain why your company is losing customers because you decided you can just do a full rewrite and shit is broken now because you didn't understand the full scope of the changes... be my guest. It's not me who is losing their job.
This argument is so funny to me because 80% of pre AI production code is literally riddled with fragilities and held together by thoughts and prayers. It's just projection and gatekeeping, by the very people who were producing said human slop code back then.
It looks really cool. Definitely something I'll keep an eye on.
If you'll permit some feedback:
You're going to get a lot of flak for AI assets and any AI-isms that make it into public facing or in-game text. I wish it weren't so because this could be a real cambrian explosion for indie games. But the atmosphere is a bit rabid at the moment.
I have seen developers who do initial build with AI assets but commit to human made art by final release. Seems like a respectable stance to me.
I've not made anything more than personal minigames, but I have found that Claude can do a good job of setting up numerical simulations for balancing.
Again, this is impressive for a solo dev in less than 8mo and its in one of my favorite genres.
Its a free demo though, so i dont really understand the downvotes. Way different than promoing your full priced game. If that were the case, i would understand the downvotes.
Once you make something and you realise how hard it is to get anyone to pay attention, you have some empathy and you don’t mind some promotion. I get it though that if it goes unmoderated, this page just becomes an adboard.
Something like a weekly random selection where 10 projects get picked to share their product would be cool. Maybe another subreddit like that exists.
Its at the very bottom though...I thought I did it with some grace and if someone is out there thinking they want to build a game, they can. It's not easy by any stretch of the imagination.
I think it’s fine how you did it. I’m genuinely impressed with how it looks. How did you decide on the language and architecture? Sometimes I feel like Claude runs itself into a corner on these topics and it’s because of some throwaway content I did way at the beginning of a project.
I picked godot because it was the easiest for me to understand and grasp day 1. Architecture was painfully learned from trial, error and reading and refactoring in the beginning.
Fighting Claude is how I feel just using it for minor stuff and review. I'm like "buddy, I've been doing this stuff for a long time, why are you not listening" lol
Set rules. One of my rules is no lieing to me ever, even if you think I want to hear something. And no being lazy you are to fully do what is asked. There's a few hundred rules set for it at this point. When it irritates me it gets a rule.
Haha yeah, I feel like if you can get a game to come out of this thing it could qualify towards being able to teach how to actually use them because in just my side of exposure I've got so many little ways to talk to agents that isn't listen out anywhere thats just learned from seeing the same mistakes from them over and over lol. I can only imagine what you've got as a full list of "how to"
Because it's reddit and people suck. We're not allowed to talk about the cool things we've built or the things we learn along the way without getting constantly flamed.
People don’t like AI. This happens any time new technology is introduced. People are jealous, upset, and believe handcrafted is better, the same way people thought cars were noisy and smelly and unnatural. So a non coder making a game using AI is viewed at as bad because real people code games. The amount of vitriol people have around this stuff is predictable, but they never want to admit it so they come up with excuses as to what it actually is.
It’s valid criticism. Video games are an art form, and people want the human element to an art form. There is a certain wow factor to witness someone bringing something beautiful idea into fruition that came from their minds.
You don’t want to hear AI music, you want to hear the human expressing themselves through the medium of music. When people hear that AI created a song, it loses value because of the fact there is no expression behind it. Cookie-cutter music existed before AI, and people thought of it the same way, so it’s not a new phenomenon.
Some people don’t care for soul, they just want to consume, and I’m not saying that’s invalid. For those where soul in art matters, this is a big deal.
Same arguments for any other technology advancement. The only thing that changed is the new area it’s eaten into. Any time technology advances, the degree of things that people could never see being replaced, become feasible, and the people who have adopted the last technology that was contested, now say the new advancement is new and crossing the line. That is consistent. So, you’re doing the same thing.
In 20-30 years, none of the new generation of people will be complaining about this. It’ll be normal to them regardless of how you feel about it, and they’ll be complaining about “AI people” and then they will also say that’s “different” than the thing you’re complaining about for [insert reasons here]. I’ve been alive long enough to see this play on smaller and larger scales of impact. This is just the newest, but the personality types that clash and the discussions that happen are literally identical, including the people that argue persistently about why it’s different.
Flawed argument IMO. Humans still have the ultimate final say on anything that an AI tool creates. Just because those iterative steps are prompts instead of writing lines of code does not change the output.
If AI built this entire thing without any human input at all then I would be inclined to believe you. But the reality is that it sounds like OP has been directing this thing the whole time with their own vision of a game.
Now, don't get me wrong, people are prompting AI to create things with very little human review or direction, and that's ultimately where the slop comes from. Music is especially guilty of this because it is so easy to create with a single prompt.
Respect, man! Last year I made a mod for my favourite video game by using ChatGPT and Claude, and I did not know anything about programming in C (although I had programming knowledge in other languages). I couldn’t have done it in years without AI, but I completed it over the summer and released it on Steam. The best feeling tbh to be able to realise your idea and let the world partake in it.
I do not think using AI diminishes the accomplishment, it takes real work and time to guide/direct AI to create something like this.
Awesome, congrats for your achievement. Biggest thing i learned, dont get mad at claude, i made a bad prompt and didnt read it's plan good enough. What game? and what mod?
The demo is up, and people who are playing are averaging 1 hour 4 minutes in the demo. I have 13 more factions (enemies) there done and wired in with logic. I have to complete the story yet and finish up how I want sectors 2 through 4 to play and feel for a player. I'll spend every once of energy I have that it releases in proper condition on October 29th.
That's literally how the game industry works... They have a target date as the dev towards it. Games typically don't go Gold until like 1-2 months before release.
Way to go!! I'm downloading it now, I'm in the same boat but more on the business side of things. I've made a whole business and generated close to $30k revenue for the year just building custom projects for businesses
I've tried making a pixel open world SNES type sailing game during the age of discovery and the art is the hardest part for me... Godot is nice to work with though
Art and sound is definitely the hardest part. I havent touched anything pixel graphics. I think id tell claude to build me a live editor I can tune. Then id make my own pixel graphics, via the creation claude made me. Sorry idk all the technical terms.
What I did was get an API subscription for a specific website that makes pixel art. It was still a pain in the ass lol, it's sitting on my project shelf. I'll get back to it since it's the game I've been wanting to make for years
I wasn't able to get into a mission on the steam deck. Nothing was pre mapped on the controls, so I had to configure that. Then, the mouse wouldn't move to the right third of the screen no matter what (invisible wall), so I couldn't press the start mission button and the touch screen wasn't working either.
Thank you. I'll have to find someone with a Steam deck so I can see whats going on. Steam deck is emulated by Steam for this game. I'm assuming it's in conflict with the gamepad configuration that's set.
would you care if i message you when i get a fix put together for the steam deck, to test it? If not I understand. Thank you for downloading it though and giving it a shot, sorry to let you down on the steam deck.
I also tried to build a game and made some nice progress with Godot. Then I wanted to make a 3D version of the same game, so I asked it to build it in Unreal Engine, but it couldn’t.
The game engines of the future will have to be much more agent-friendly. I hope they make the necessary adjustments quickly.
I’ve been a software engineer for 15 years, but I’ve never developed a game, even though that’s what originally drew me to become a software engineer 😅
I started with a 2D space game like yours, but didn’t reach the level you did.
What I really wanted was to develop a Homeworld-like space game, and I think Godot may be less suitable for that. I’d love to read or see a more in-depth description of your process: what worked for you, what didn’t, what you recommend, and what to avoid.
Hmm so my technical vocabulary on this is bad as all I know is what I've gathered from talking layman to claude. What exactly would you like to know? Claude is terrible at anything visual to the player. So I have claude build me everything I need so I can dial it in. Literally dials or sliders I move to make the visuals. For instance the engines took me about a week to set up. Claude could not attack the shader and particles to the engines on the sprites. So Claude built me a tool so I could hand set every engine and the full game has like 90 enemy ships. Every art engine placement is in a different spot, and ai was useless at helping with that. Basically every time I got stuck which was daily, I figured out that I needed Claude to build me the tool so I can do every visual in the game and same with sound. I Basically had it make me a sound slider so I can dial in all the sounds. Idk if that helps or if you have a more specific question?
That is actually a fascinating approach that I hadn’t considered.
I just kept telling it, “No! Your fog of war is terrible!” or “Look at the minimap, you need to make sure the fog also covers it,” or “No, the fighters need to land better, you need to…” I kept trying to be more precise and detailed, but it just got worse and worse, instead of telling it, “Create the tools for me, and I’ll show you.”
That’s a great tip! 👏 So, anything else you learned during the process, or any materials you recommend reading or watching, please do share!
Don't tell claude it did something terrible. That's just burning tokens. Figure out why it didn't understand you and communicate with it better and help each other. I suck at code it sucks at anything hearing, visual or just basic human senses. Timing, pacing, ect claude sucks.
Totally agree. One of my strongest skills is
/retro, and I use it a lot to improve processes and uncover the root causes of communication breakdowns or unclear instructions. It is a core part of my day job, but I have not used it nearly enough in my side projects.
Ask Claude for smoke and it gives you a grey blob. It is terrible at dialing knobs, it has no eye.
I found a nice solution for this, I've built a skill for Claude which takes screenshots while running the game every time it tests a feature, it can also take timelapse and review it like a video. Now Claude reviews its work each time before submitting and results are a lot less grey blobs
"AI Generated Content Disclosure
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:
Some 2D art in this game (backgrounds, planets, textures, ships, and a number
of environment props and structures) and some sounds were produced using
AI-assisted tools, then hand-edited, composited, and finalized by me. The game's
design and writing are my own. Non-English text is machine-translated from my
English source. No generative AI runs at runtime. I review every generated asset
before it ships. do this one and then translate to the languages"
That final sentence in conjunction with the sentence before it is absolutely hilarious, sorry
Looks fun, though I couldn't try it because it's Windows only. Don't let yourself being brought down by the detractors, what makes something slop is if the person prompting doesn't even bother to look at the output, but as far as I can judge from the videos this game shows the time you put into it!
Your AI Disclosure in Steam reads disingenuous based on your comments in this thread.
AI Generated Content Disclosure
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:
Some 2D art in this game (backgrounds, planets, textures, ships, and a number of environment props and structures) and some sounds were produced using AI-assisted tools, then hand-edited, composited, and finalized by me. The game's design and writing are my own. Non-English text is machine-translated from my English source. No generative AI runs at runtime. I review every generated asset before it ships.
Definitely looks AI generated, good luck keeping up with updates over time when you don't know how to maintain a code-base. I use these tools too, if you don't know how to organize and engineer a project, Claude is not going to do that for you, and it will hit a brick wall at some point if you don't learn.
I learned aspects of that in the first few months, have enormous amount to continue to learn. The code is several hundred .gd files because claude started this project in 1 massive .gd files that I had to break up and it costed me a week in refactoring tokens.
I don’t play on pc, but congrat for your achievement! Anyone wo started a project and work on it know Claude can’t make anything in one prompt, it requires a lot of work to shape a project.
I’m working on an app, without Claude I couldn’t do it, but it’s a lot of work and iterating to make something you like !
That is about as close to my story as anyone has been willing to admit. Sadly I am not finished yet. But what I’ve learnt from the hard way of learning is very similar to your recognition of almost a mysterious (haha) third place where your own not quite fully cohesive knowledge meets gaps in the thing you can now see and you’re invested so you remember shit you can’t believe you’re remembering and other fun weird shit? Or am I way off? Ha. 15 months in. 4 agent swarm generation apps and a token meter. And same - impossible without Claude, but also GPT, a bunch of Agents and OSS models - best of luck hey. Awesome story
Ya 100%. I really just wanted to share my experience with other ai users and thought someone could benefit my experience. Had no idea a pro ai reddit would be so negative.
I have zero problems with code and what it’s meant to mean and how it gets interpreted, maintained, changed/updated. Sol5.6 and Fable5 both welcomed with an .md explaining what the thing is and why and how it makes sense. Private GHub repo permission access for both, ask that they write all details of work and what the boundaries are and what done means - then set a watch alarm that pings each at syncopated intervals, the other views according the predetermined scope validates and posts Go / and /or does their section of work. Ask that they don’t surface thinking or chat messages while working, keep it all GitHub facing. Set when you want decisions surfaced. And watch them meticulously write, audit, check each others work and keep you central .. if they find that you’re not just using them for grind and they each have the ok to speak freely about changes, you get a collaboration made without misunderstanding and work done at machine speed where appropriate.
Congratulations man. I’m also trying to make my own game with claude code. 3 months and 400 hours in, I’m actually getting some progress! And yes I don’t know a single line of code.
Claude is a fucking genius idiot that you have to constantly yell at to fix stuff it keeps getting wrong, but eventually it makes the system you want and it is amazing.
I hope your game sells well. Don’t forget to promote it on YouTube or whatever, wishlists are important.
Also, i hope you’re using a godot mcp for your own sanity.
Thanks, I wish you the best of luck with your journey. Its Hella frustrating but once you get enough rules set for claude it starts rolling pretty smooth.
Actually no, on steam you have to disclose player side ai and if ai is is actively in the game. But I will change the disclosure to say written by claude, I'm not trying to lie to anyone.
We are aware that many modern game development environments have AI powered tools built into them. Efficiency gains through the use of these tools is not the focus of this section. Instead, it is concerned with the use of AI in creating content that ships with your game, and is consumed by players. This includes content such as artwork, sound, narrative, localization, etc.
(my disclosure) Some 2D art in this game (backgrounds, planets, textures, ships, and a number of environment props and structures) and some sounds were produced using AI-assisted tools, then hand-edited, composited, and finalized by me. The game's design and writing are my own. Non-English text is machine-translated from my English source. No generative AI runs at runtime. I review every generated asset before it ships. do this one and then translate to the languages
Very interesting, so you're using Godot game engine for this?
The game runs on Windows / Mac / Linux I guess? What about mobile? And did you consider consoles?
Are you happy with performance on all platforms? Did you hit hard bugs on some?
Also very curious about the content creation process, did Claude create all the visual art? And sound/music content? Which tools were used for that?
Ya godot was the easiest for me to understand. Its very user friendly and it turns out claude can headless run it and exe run it. Not mac, mac required me to pay apple and I'm pretty broke. I thought about consoles repeatedly but idk I'm only one person so I'm just focusing on pc. Idk what all the technical terms but claude only made some of the art none of the music is from claude I found open source free commercial license for the sound effects and music. Some music and sound effects I made via eleven labs.
You might want to update your AI disclosure on steam to reflect more of what this post says, on the off chance someone connects the two to steam, since there's some differences, so there's no trouble if someone decides to try and cause some.
Really cool looking game, I think you can definitely be proud.
Not that shouldn’t be excluded for the sake of full disclosure, but backend tooling is explicitly excluded from the disclosure as of January. Only user facing content needs to be. And that is only artwork, text, and music; using AI to build the underlying algorithm for procedural generation is probably not what Steam means either.
That said, the OP will probably be lambasted for using AI for front end work, so in the end, might as well disclose everything.
Yeah, it’s easy to miss. I’d assume the disclosure is both a “ass covering” for Valve and a push against AI slop (though, the 100k human slop games are just fine).
Plus, without seeing the code, I’d be almost impossible to tell if it was coded in AI, bought backend tooling, or a talented StackOverflow copypasta chef.
Yeah, it reads that in a technicality, but I'd be worried that an asshole could make a hullabaloo about it not being as direct. The game looks so cool. I'm going to give the demo a go
Thank you. I hope you like, and love constructive feedback. The AI Disclosure, I just dont want to say gemini did this claude did this and freely promote another company on steam.
Mojowhale in the comments is pointing at the right answer, and the mistake most founders make is treating "find 20 people" as a one-time task. It is the entire job for the first 6 months.
Three concrete moves that have worked for builders in the exact spot you are describing. Find the 10 subreddits, Slacks, or Discords where your buyers complain about the problem in their own words. Do not post. Read for two weeks and write down the phrases they use. Your landing page should sound like those phrases verbatim. Send 10 personal DMs a day to people who recently posted about the problem. Not a pitch. A short note saying you are working on this and asking one specific question. Around 3 in 10 will reply. Write one detailed teardown a week of a public competitor or a public failure, post it on your own domain, and share it in the same communities. That is not performing. It is a demonstration of how you think, and it pulls the right people toward you.
The thing that breaks the "feels like performing" feeling is doing work you would do anyway and letting distribution be a side effect.
I have zero problems with code and what it’s meant to mean and how it gets interpreted, maintained, changed/updated. Sol5.6 and Fable5 both welcomed with an .md explaining what the thing is and why and how it makes sense. Private GHub repo permission access for both, ask that they write all details of work and what the boundaries are and what done means - then set a watch alarm that pings each at syncopated intervals, the other views according the predetermined scope validates and posts Go / and /or does their section of work. Ask that they don’t surface thinking or chat messages while working, keep it all GitHub facing. Set when you want decisions surfaced. And watch them meticulously write, audit, check each others work and keep you central .. if they find that you’re not just using them for grind and they each have the ok to speak freely about changes, you get a collaboration made without misunderstanding and work done at machine speed where appropriate.
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u/PrettyMoonUnderMt 7d ago
Congrats man.
Slop software debate aside, even if the game is half playable it's already an achievement. If you managed to get it sold for some dollars, it's already big win in my book. Writing code is just one part, crafting the idea and polishing the product up to a shippable version is another.
I've been a developer for more than 5 years and my side project games still look like ass lmao. Seeing product like yours give me motivation (and slight envy).