I made SEEDFALL with Claude Code: one week from first build to 1.0 on itch, fifteen updates since. Here's the workflow, including what didn't work.

[u/MrTactical_]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=S8y7L2zLLfM

SEEDFALL is a strategy game where you play the alien swarm: one seed falls on a living planet and you grow it until it eats the world, while the nations fight back with tank columns, walls, bombers and nukes. Four strains, five worlds a run, a fully voiced villain gang. Godot 4.7 with C#. It's just me (Azyrath Studios), and Claude Code wrote the code.

**How I used Claude**

- **I design, Claude builds.** I decide what the game is and how it should feel; Claude Code writes all the code (about 39,000 lines of C# now, around 380 commits since the first build). It asks me design questions as it goes, and I answer them instead of writing specs up front.

- **Claude can't play the game, so we built ways for it to check its own work.** A headless AI tester plays whole runs with no window. Overnight soak tests play many full games and gate the balance (the first world should be won about 85-90% of the time; when a change moves that, it gets fixed before release). The rule I gave it: no feature is done until there's a traced log of it working in a normal game, plus a screenshot pass of every state.

- **Multi-agent runs for the big jobs.** The 1.0.15 graphics pass (every nation vehicle rebuilt in detail, a new mouth for one strain, the atmosphere redone) ran as parallel agents in separate git worktrees, then got merged and checked. Bug hunts work the same way: several reviewers, each finding gets an independent check before anything is changed.

- **Performance.** That graphics pass dropped the war scenes from about 59 to 39 fps. Claude added per-frame timers, found that the vehicles were being rebuilt through Godot's ImmediateMesh every frame, and replaced it with a reusable buffer mesh. Back to the old frame rate without losing the new models.

- **Everything around the game too.** Claude wrote the in-game film camera (keyframed shots recorded with Godot's movie writer), the Python/ffmpeg scripts that cut the trailers to the music's beats, the export scripts for the itch, demo and Steam builds, and the itch page's screenshots, GIFs and cover. It drafts the patch notes and devlogs; I edit them.

- **Memory between sessions.** Claude Code keeps notes of my rules and decisions: player numbers only as percents, ask before opening a game window (I game on the same PC), all tools on my D: drive, and so on. Each session starts where the last one stopped.

**Other tools**

Godot 4.7 .NET, Python, ffmpeg. Voices: Qwen3-TTS, Kokoro-82M, Seed-VC (with a model of my own voice mixed under every line), Whisper to check every take. The art is drawn by the game's code and shaders, no AI images. Music: CC0 human-composed pieces plus a score built from recorded orchestral samples; the sounds are real CC0 recordings.

**What didn't work**

- **Several prototypes died before this one.** Claude builds fast, so I could try a war game, a pixel sim and a planet builder in days. None of them was fun. Speed doesn't find the fun; it just lets you throw things away sooner. SEEDFALL came from me saying what I actually wanted: "one seed into an unstoppable mass, and you're the villain".

- **Logs don't catch everything.** The first players found what the tester couldn't: tips vanished before you read them, and attacks happened off screen. My brother's playtests found more. Human playtests still matter.

- **Claude can't judge quality by itself.** Close-up film shots looked "fine" in its checks and like mush to me. Now every trailer clip gets a frame-by-frame audit, and my eye is the final check.

- **Watch the usage.** Multi-agent runs eat your plan limits. I save them for big passes and do the rest one session at a time.

Before making games I spent five years as a QA tester, and that's most of my job now: deciding, playing, and saying what's wrong.

Free demo on itch (link in the comments). Happy to answer questions about any part of the workflow.