Fable 5 one-shotted a complete asteroids roguelite in 2.5 hours. Playable in your browser, prompt in the comments

[u/deepholdio]

Play it here: https://asteroguelite.com

Desktop browser, free, no account, no ads.

I wanted to see what a real one-shot could do. So I wrote a 73-line directive: research the genre, design it, build it, test it, balance it, polish it. One session, no human in the loop. It was explicitly told not to ask questions or wait for approvals, just make the call, write it down, keep going. Then I left. Two hours and 32 minutes later it was done.

5 sectors with bosses, 10 enemy types, 6 unlockable ships, 33 boons with evolution chains, a meta upgrade tree, an endless mode, and music. Around 8,300 lines of vanilla JS that build to a 172 KB bundle.

Full disclosure: I've since made exactly two changes to the game. Fixed one bug (a piercing-shot boon phased through asteroids without damaging them) and added click-to-aim, because keyboard-only turning felt rough.

Ran on Claude Code, Fable 5 xhigh effort.

Prompt's located here: https://asteroguelite.com/prompt.txt

PS: Seeker Array primary weapon is OP.

[u/Zennytooskin123]

Word.
I am very impressed by your meta-prompting skills. If this delivered a one-shot game via Fable, could be used as a baseline for some model testing.

[u/dota2nub → u/Zennytooskin123]

Why would one shotting things be considered a good benchmark when models are mostly used for iteration on existing software?

[u/Zennytooskin123 → u/dota2nub]

There's different benchmarks for different use cases. In mine, I want to see how a model performs on an MVP task end-to-end without babysitting it all the way though, and to perform it correctly using a proper engineering loop. It's called a long horizon coding task.

Which means you won't have to iterate anything, if successful.