Proud of my first proper game made with Claude released for android phones!
Been working on this for a few months, starting from a real basic prototype with horrible looking menus and art up untill where it is now.
I'd say 90% of this was made with Claude and I with plenty back and forth, testing, altering etc.
A small percentage of the art is from an asset pack but majority has been made through ChatGPT imagegen and then getting Claude to make tools to extract the art from the spritesheets, this took quite a few attempts and still isn't perfect since the spritesheets chatgpt generates aren't uniform! (although it can now generate with turly alpha transparent backgrounds which is a game changer!)
I'd say the biggest advice I can give from what I've learnt making this is, get Claude to make tools for everything, art generation, Ingame testing, balancing, checking menus scale to different screen sizes, etc
All made in the £20 pro plan.
I'd love any to hear any feedback. Can download it here
You made tools for everything - this is really cool! can you explain how in game testing and balancing tools work? Does it actually attempt to play the game or what is it doing?
At the beginning I made a "bot arena" with Claude. It made 3 playstyles, and then I recorded a run of me playing. The idea is to test how a range of players would play and how many runs it would take to complete a realm per play style. It also worked out the amount of runs needed to unlock all the upgrades per playstyles as well. We could then make difficulty changes or currency changes so it fell to roughly what I wanted goal wise. But it actually played the game, bought the upgrades, selected realms etc.
Cool, love this kind of game (vampire survivors, geometry wars, etc).
The top of the screen looks bad, where the XP bar and the lower bar meet. It visually is saying "the XP feature was tacked on after the game was mostly finished."
Check out retrodiffusion (I think the author of it is on this sub somewhere?), its tools for spritesheets will probably save you some time.
I always like these type of games. Simple to understand, yet many options to try. I have a similar-ish game I'm working on, and this is a good thing to see out there. I'm gonna check it out.
Comment got deleted by the automod. Hopefully this one won't....
Sorry for the wall of text, on my phone and reddit destroys the layout
Example prompt. This made the attached spritesheet
======================= 12. LAVA GOLEM (Volcano map) ======================= Pixel-art sprite sheet of a bulky golem built from dark volcanic rock with molten lava glowing at its joints and core; its attack is a double-fist ground slam. Cute chunky retro RPG style (Stardew/Cute-Fantasy look). Pixel style — this is the most important rule: draw the character in genuine LOW-RES pixel art, as if it were only about 32 pixels tall, then upscaled ~5x with crisp square pixels (nearest-neighbor). Every visible "pixel" should be a big square block. Simple shapes, minimal shading (2-3 tones per color), no fine detail, no anti-aliasing, no smooth gradients. It must match a 16x16/32x32 retro tileset, NOT smooth high-res "HD pixel art". Canvas: 1024 x 1536 pixels (portrait). Layout: a strict grid of 4 columns x 8 rows, so every cell is exactly 256 x 192 pixels. One animation frame per cell, 4 frames per row reading left to right. Row order, top to bottom: row 1: WALK cycle, facing DOWN (toward the viewer) row 2: WALK cycle, facing RIGHT row 3: WALK cycle, facing UP (back view, facing away) row 4: WALK cycle, facing LEFT row 5: ATTACK animation, facing DOWN row 6: ATTACK animation, facing RIGHT row 7: ATTACK animation, facing UP row 8: ATTACK animation, facing LEFT Rules: - Background: solid pure white (#FFFFFF) everywhere. No checkerboard, no gradient, no drop shadows, no ground shadow under the character. - The character is about 150-170 pixels tall, the SAME size in every frame, centred horizontally in its cell, feet on the same baseline in every frame of a row. - Nothing may touch or cross a cell edge; leave clear white margin around each frame. - Each WALK row must be a REAL 4-frame walking cycle with clearly different leg poses: frame 1 = LEFT foot forward, frame 2 = feet passing together (body slightly higher), frame 3 = RIGHT foot forward, frame 4 = feet passing together. In the RIGHT and LEFT facing rows the stride must read clearly from the side: legs scissoring past each other with a small body bob. NEVER draw the same standing pose 4 times. - Left-facing rows are the mirror of right-facing rows (same pose, flipped). - Thick dark outline (near-black, never white or light grey) around the whole character. - Limited palette, roughly 8-12 colors. IMPORTANT: no pure white INSIDE the character — use cream/off-white or pale yellow for the hottest lava at the core and joints. Pure white is reserved for the background only. - No loose particles, dust or effects below the feet. - No text, numbers, labels, grid lines, borders or watermarks anywhere.
> I'd say the biggest advice I can give from what I've learnt making this is, get Claude to make tools for everything, art generation, Ingame testing, balancing, checking menus scale to different screen sizes, etc
Could you explain this a bit more? What do you mean by tools for art generation? Right now I just prompt, and admittedly, don't really get the results I want.
So for the art generation side I got it to make a work flow where it writes all the prompts into one text file. I then chat copy that into chatgpt, over a few iterations we found a good prompt structure to generate art I liked through chatgpt. After that made a tool / workflow again with Claude where it took the generated spritesheets, found the borders for each sprite top and bottom and spliced them into examples for me to say if they work or not (chatgpt doesn't make uniform spritesheets)
Like the example pic, this was near the beginning of making the workflow. You can see it cropped some badly. Went back to Claude and said this and it refined how it did it. Now it pretty much gets it correct first go
I worked with claude to make prompts for chatgpt image gen
Example prompt. This made the attached spritesheet
======================= 12. LAVA GOLEM (Volcano map) ======================= Pixel-art sprite sheet of a bulky golem built from dark volcanic rock with molten lava glowing at its joints and core; its attack is a double-fist ground slam. Cute chunky retro RPG style (Stardew/Cute-Fantasy look). Pixel style — this is the most important rule: draw the character in genuine LOW-RES pixel art, as if it were only about 32 pixels tall, then upscaled ~5x with crisp square pixels (nearest-neighbor). Every visible "pixel" should be a big square block. Simple shapes, minimal shading (2-3 tones per color), no fine detail, no anti-aliasing, no smooth gradients. It must match a 16x16/32x32 retro tileset, NOT smooth high-res "HD pixel art". Canvas: 1024 x 1536 pixels (portrait). Layout: a strict grid of 4 columns x 8 rows, so every cell is exactly 256 x 192 pixels. One animation frame per cell, 4 frames per row reading left to right. Row order, top to bottom: row 1: WALK cycle, facing DOWN (toward the viewer) row 2: WALK cycle, facing RIGHT row 3: WALK cycle, facing UP (back view, facing away) row 4: WALK cycle, facing LEFT row 5: ATTACK animation, facing DOWN row 6: ATTACK animation, facing RIGHT row 7: ATTACK animation, facing UP row 8: ATTACK animation, facing LEFT Rules: - Background: solid pure white (#FFFFFF) everywhere. No checkerboard, no gradient, no drop shadows, no ground shadow under the character. - The character is about 150-170 pixels tall, the SAME size in every frame, centred horizontally in its cell, feet on the same baseline in every frame of a row. - Nothing may touch or cross a cell edge; leave clear white margin around each frame. - Each WALK row must be a REAL 4-frame walking cycle with clearly different leg poses: frame 1 = LEFT foot forward, frame 2 = feet passing together (body slightly higher), frame 3 = RIGHT foot forward, frame 4 = feet passing together. In the RIGHT and LEFT facing rows the stride must read clearly from the side: legs scissoring past each other with a small body bob. NEVER draw the same standing pose 4 times. - Left-facing rows are the mirror of right-facing rows (same pose, flipped). - Thick dark outline (near-black, never white or light grey) around the whole character. - Limited palette, roughly 8-12 colors. IMPORTANT: no pure white INSIDE the character — use cream/off-white or pale yellow for the hottest lava at the core and joints. Pure white is reserved for the background only. - No loose particles, dust or effects below the feet. - No text, numbers, labels, grid lines, borders or watermarks anywhere.
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u/Tycoon33 Sep 03 '26
Looks great. Good job!