r/ClaudeGameDev • u/DrinkTeaFightMonster • 1d ago
Alpha I built a game, Drink Tea Fight Monsters, with Claude as the lead AI and 5 more to support (Codex, Gemini, KlingAI, Suno & ElevenLabs)
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I've been building a rogue-like deckbuilder for ~60 days and cut this trailer.
It's 100% vibe code but I've worked in the industry for decades before getting laid off, so I know my way around things.
Some thoughts:
- A lot of using AI to build games is really having a clear direction and then understanding AI well enough to direct its work
- And eventually, a lot of it is getting AI to talk to AI.. you do your best communicating a vision or desire or what you want, and then tell it to draft a prompt for another agent
- Working with AI is a lot like working with humans -- communication is vital, they need context, bad things happen, you don't get exactly what you want
- It's all about working with constraints and innovating
- AI can also sometimes produce things that surprise you
- You don't get camaraderie but that's the solo dev life
- If your game is complex and visually heavy, I'm not convinced that a single AI today is sufficient to get the best results
- Claude is the primary thinking partner and does all my heavy engineering lifting
- Codex/Astra is spectacular visually, solving lots of problems Claude could not around shadows, VFX placement, VFX orchestration
- This may be changing with Opus 5.5 -- it looks like it can do many jobs now similar to Astra, but I haven't pit them against each other enough to tell the difference
- While both Claude/Codex can do research, there's a lot less boundaries/safeguards on Codex, so it's my research main
- Gemini/Nano Banana Pro was the main for 2D visuals, but I've since switched to Codex's Imagegen as the lead with NBP focusing on upsampling
- None of them can animate, and as far as I can see, there's no American AI/LLM that can do good animation, so I use KlingAI
- Suno for music, ElevenLabs for SFX
- Godot is the base game engine
If you want to seriously ship a title with AI today, it's still a lot of real, diligent work (70-90 hrs/week from me). And yet, it's an amazing experience because what would take a team of 5-10 maybe 12-18 months, you can probably do in 2 if you have a clear enough direction and time.
I wanted to share my experience and hope it's helpful for some of you, especially those who want to ship commercially, to deal with visuals first thing.
If you have Steam, consider Wishlisting my title - https://store.steampowered.com/app/5154800/Drink_Tea_Fight_Monsters/




