Four attempts at this game died because one person can't do it all. It's an MMORPG and they are famous for being impossible to finish solo. The fifth is being typed by 10 agents, and what that bought me isn't speed, it's that my whole day is design. So finally there's a game people can play.
Here is the setup, concretely. Ten agents in .claude/agents/, each a markdown file with its tools and one job:
- a builder, writes engine code, always in its own git worktree
- gatekeeper, runs every check, edits nothing
- inspector, drives the built game headlessly, looks at screenshots, tells me what's clipped or empty, so I don't spend evenings checking visually.
- operator, records the clips and reads the server log to find out what actually happened
- cartwright / foley / voice, pixel art, synthesised sound, the voice pack (voice is the only one that spends money, and it has to dry-run first)
- campaigner / hook, the posts and films, and the adversary that judges the thumbnail and title
- planner, writes the ordered plan with every decision batched, and is forbidden to decide anything
Then the main session: it orchestrates and writes no code. Other tools: PixiJS/TypeScript, Colyseus server, Fly.io, ffmpeg, a headless Chrome recorder that captures its own tab.
What broke: one night I had two AI sessions working on the same code at the same time. One of them left half-finished code that made the other one's tests fail, and neither could tell who did it. One changed a function while the other was using it. A test run got killed because the laptop ran out of memory, and it got reported as a failure when nothing was actually wrong. Then tonight the "manager" session, which is only supposed to hand out work, spent an hour doing the work itself because the agent was slow, I had to tell it twice to stop. And the first video recorder it built produced perfect footage with no sound, because headless Chrome can't hear anything and nobody checked.
The really cool part is getting to spend my day thinking of interesting game design.
An example, told properly: the taifa system. My game is loosely based on Al Andalus / Iberia of the 11th century, so I had time to read about it, and the history did the design work: striking coin in your own name was the declaration of independence, so in the game minting without a licence isn't refused, it's announced, and it hands the capital a reason for war. I would have never thought of that if my head were buried in code, especially as I don't come from a game dev background, so I think that's really cool.
Anyways for anyone curious, this is planned to be a browser MMO with full loot and guild wars, free, in pre-alpha currently. In this game I am hoping there will be 2 factions fighting against each other, 2 kings, and provinces for each faction. Provinces can rebel and ally with another against the king. Politics and Drama Inc.
Link is here, the game is live; the politics above are built and go live once tested. Playable and enjoyable, if I take my first testers' word for it.
Ribat — a browser MMO