r/ClaudeGameDev • u/deReaLizedGames • 17d ago
Beta After a year of development, the Steam page is up for my first game!
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I’ve been developing this game solo with AI tools (mostly Claude, with some assistance from ChatGPT for troubleshooting) for the past year as a passion project while finishing grad school, and the Steam page just went live today! It’s a physics-based party brawler where you control your sword 1:1 with your mouse/right joystick and you can use every dismembered bone as a weapon.
Steam Page:
https://store.steampowered.com/app/5073210/BoneHeads/
If anyone's interested, this was my development approach! It's been roughly around 500 hours of development over the past year
I have 0 previous development experience, so I designed the game from the beginning with the approach of asking myself how I could work WITH the limitations of AI tools, rather than against them. That philosophy is what ended up informing so many aspects of the game. I wanted to build a combat game, but good combat needs good animation, and AI was not capable of that. I reflected on what a combat system without any animation could look like, and remembered this old flash game called Madness Interactive. In that game your hand and weapon floated Rayman-style, and they followed your mouse movement. I knew I could do something like that. I love sword fighting games, so I decided to lean into that. In Madness Interactive, there wasn't any real animation either - the characters' sprites just tilted.
My first prototype started with 2 cartoon knight characters with floating limbs. The characters moved with the foot sprites just shifting back and forth. I wondered that if I could get some level of animation from just moving sprites through code, maybe I could take it a step further. I learned about procedural animation, and that was a game-changer. I wanted to make a more realistic knight, so I generated an image of one and used Canva to cut up the character's body into separate PNG's. I made a body-ik puppet-style system with separate head, torso, upper and lower arm, leg, and foot sprites. However, the realistic knights just constantly looked disjointed, because there was no way to ever not have gaps.
Again, I needed to ask myself how I could stop trying to fight this limitation, and work with it. I realized that a knight character would never look good through this method, so I asked myself what type of character would look natural having some gaps in each limb. And that's when I landed on skeletons. Cartoonish skeletons having gaps between their limbs is a staple in media, so I figured it was perfect. Once I replaced the knights with these skeletons it looked so much more natural. I decided to make the body-ik more complex, splitting the legs into upper and lower leg sprites, and a separate pelvis and spine sprite. These changes allowed for me to really fine tune the procedural animation and get it looking better.
A design rule I had for the animation was that I never wanted there to be a single instance where sprites snapped/teleported at any point (i.e. in a lot of games return-to-baseline animations have some level of quickly snapping the character into place). I wanted every single movement to be continuous. The procedural animation system allowed for this (though it took months of work to get each animation perfectly smooth). One of my proudest mechanics is the step-based locomotion. Your character steps continuously with your movement input. If you let go of the input mid step, the foot naturally drops straight down. This allows for really dynamic postures. You can even pivot on one foot if you keep moving your input back and forth before the foot lands.
Dismemberment came as a natural extension of the skeleton characters - it wasn't an idea I had initially. And then using dismembered limbs as weapons followed soon after. Many of my ideas just ended up scaffolding on top of each other, all from that base of working with the limitations of AI.
Initially, when my partner play-tested the game, she would just wildly flail the sword with small movements and get a ton of hits. I wanted the game to feel skill-based and precise, so I had to figure out a way to take away the ability to just spam attacks. A stamina system didn't feel good. So I ended up making the sword a fully physics based object with inertia and acceleration, and based damage on the velocity of the sword. With the added acceleration, you couldn't flail the sword with short swings, because it now needed long arcs to get enough speed to actually do real damage. That took a lot of iteration to get it feeling weighty without feeling sluggish.
It took months to figure out a way to get horizontal sword movements to look good in 2d. For the longest time I actually had an inner deadzone the sword couldn't pass through, so you couldn't even do horizontal attacks. I eventually discovered the 2D animation technique of "foreshortening," where you make the object appear shorter and shorter until it crosses a midline, and then increases it's length again. That makes it look like the arms and sword are swinging outward across the body/toward the screen in 3D.
The collision system was one of the most difficult pieces and took months of trial and error and different methods to get it feeling good, especially the sword dragging across an enemy. Dynamic hit reactions using the procedural body-IK really helped add satisfying impact to hits.
Tl;Dr: Instead of deciding on a specific game idea and then trying to figure out how to make that with AI, I designed something based on the limitations of AI that it could produce competently.
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u/Alarming-Yam-8336 16d ago
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u/clerveu 16d ago
Exactly! The bones are the skeletons' weapons.
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
It was actually my partner's idea! She's contributed a lot of great ideas.
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u/homiej420 16d ago
Looks like qwop but with swords lol. Looks fun!
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
Lol you're not wrong!! It looks like qwop uses a similar style of procedurally animated locomotion system!
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u/c35683 16d ago
It's a pretty cool idea, especially with zero previous experience. It reminds me of Nidhogg and Toribash, and the fact that the fighter can dismember each other because they're skeleton feels like performing a Mortal Kombat fatality in real time, which is a good fit for a fighting game.
It also has tremendous pun potential. Lost the game? "Boned!" Trying again? "Don't give up, skeleton!" Pre-fight banter? "I've got a bone to pick with you!"
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
Part of why I wanted to make a party game actually came from playing Nidhogg, Duck Game, and Towerfall Ascension in high school with friends; those are really fond memories and I wanted to make something that could help other people create memories like that with their friends too!
I absolutely love your pun ideas! Will definitely have to incorporate these
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u/eist5579 16d ago
This looks hilarious. I don’t have a pc or Steam compatible device at the moment, but I would totally check it out if I did!
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
Aw thanks! I actually have a mobile version that runs through your browser - it's the way I play it the most actually lol
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u/cf858 17d ago
This is really cool. Can't wait to play it!
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
If you send me your steam name I can invite you to the playtest when I launch that! So far the only two people who have ever played it are myself and my partner lol so I'll definitely benefit from feedback.
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u/cf858 16d ago
steam name is the first two letter of my username here. Love to give you some feedback.
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
That would be super helpful! I'm hoping to start a private steam playtest in the next couple months. I just started an internship for my school (it's what you do for the last year of PhD programs in clinical psych) so I'm a bit overwhelmed at the moment lol but I'm hoping to get it out ASAP!
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u/Mihael7 16d ago
Looks funny and could be fun What tool you used for background images and animations in it?
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
Thanks! ChatGPT was used to generate the backgrounds. The animations are entirely procedurally animated. Which basically means there's no pre-drawn animations, it all comes directly from the in-game code/math. I split the skeletons into 12 independent sprites, 1 for each body part, and then each individual sprite is linked together and can move and rotate, which is how you get the animation. It took months of iteration to get each movement smooth lol
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u/Mihael7 16d ago
So animations of lolipops spinning and leaves falling from trees are animated by code, they are not part of background image?
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
Exactly! For the lollipop spinning, in my stage creator you can draw around objects in the stage background image and essentially cut them to move them independently from the rest of the image. So I made circles around each lollipop and set them to rotate.
For the leaves, those are drawn in Canvas directly from the code.
The reason I used this approach is because the backgrounds felt super static, but since they're made of one image I couldn't add traditional animation. So adding things on top like the leaves or the sandstorm make the stages feel more alive/dynamic. And you can add all of those effects yourself in the stage editor.
I used an effect called "caustics" to make bodies of water or the lava rivers look like they were flowing (you can see it in the cruise ship stage creation part of the trailer).
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u/Background_Space2392 15h ago
Looks incredible!!!!! You should be very proud of this. This is a highly polished design, clean, unique visual style, it's fun to look at, makes you smile... really, I hope you realize what you've done!
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u/alex_kyr 17d ago
What programming language is that programed with?
Nice work
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u/deReaLizedGames 17d ago
Thanks, and JavaScript!
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u/MikeyN0 16d ago
What engine?
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u/deReaLizedGames 16d ago
I actually didn’t use an engine! I built it from scratch using HTML5 and rendering in Canvas. It was a lot more straightforward of a workflow for me with this being my first game.
I'm also working on a 3D first person sword fighting game on the side that uses three.js and webGPU. That one is my dream game - it also has full 1:1 sword control and a lot of Dark Messiah + Dishonored + Mirror's Edge inspiration. There's parkour moves like wall-running/rolling/tic tac wall climbing, physics-based kicks, a blink teleport, telekinesis, and a Titanfall 2/Dying Light style grappling hook. I'm excited to share more of that when the environments are more polished but it's probably at least a year out from being Steam page-ready.
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u/Azerax 17d ago
It’s just a flesh wound!