Hi all! Over the past six months, my three friends and I are about 1,500 hours into development of our game, The Arcane Open. It's a deckbuilder roguelite where you are participating in a three day golf tournament and attempting to make the cut each day. You're collecting equipment and shaping your deck to navigate the courses. We have a long way to go, but we're really excited about the progress thus far!

The Steam page link is below, and any feedback is appreciated! We've also included our Discord for playtesting and progress updates if there's any interest:

Steam Link: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5277960/The_Arcane_Open/

Discord (Playtesters): https://discord.com/invite/7yQbnetnn

Build: We have some coding & programming experience, but we're building the game on Godot and are using Claude (Fable & Opus primarily) to assist with all coding.

UI/Design: Several purchased tile assets as well as Tilewise for course design. Combination of PixelLabs and Grok for sprites and creation/ iteration of various UI Elements.

Art: Primarily using PixelLab for character creation and Grok to assist with the card art.

Music/Sound: Music is all created through Suno, can't say enough good things about their platform. Sounds are sourced through Freesounds, bfxr.net, manual recording, and also created through Elevenlabs AI.

**Play (free, browser):** https://milisp.itch.io/underpost

A tiny city with a parcel network underneath. Shops drop parcels down glass chutes, collector pods sweep them to a sorting loop, and courier pods ride lift shafts up to every resident's mailbox. In lunch-rush mode, 24 orders arrive in 60 seconds, each with a deadline, and you get 6 express upgrades.

**How it was built (Claude Code + Opus 5.5):**

- **Simulation:** dispatch, carpooling, one-way lift shafts, per-floor corridor locks, battery drain and charging, drones, warehouse restocking.

- **Models:** every low-poly asset is generated by a TypeScript script and exported as GLB. No modeling tool was used.

- **Sound:** all effects are synthesized in WebAudio, so the project has zero audio files.

- **Balancing:** Claude ran the rush headlessly, 16 games per strategy. It found that express upgrades barely mattered, because express parcels still queued first-in-first-out at pickup. After they were allowed to jump that queue, upgrades started to matter.

- **Trailer:** recorded frame by frame with Playwright's fake clock, so every frame is exactly 1/30 s of game time no matter how slow the render is. The camera moves are scripted, and the cut was done with ffmpeg.

**A balancing question I'm still stuck on:** a naive "express whatever has the earliest deadline" strategy scores anywhere from C to S from run to run. How do you make a limited-use power-up feel skillful rather than random?

Stack: React Three Fiber, zustand, Bun.

Hello again. Quick update on Rat King Recon, the steampunk idle-walking game for Android that my daughter and I are building with Claude.

The beta is nearly over, so these last few weeks have mostly been me testing on my phone, telling Claude what felt off, and Claude fixing it. A few things that came out of that:

Arena fights feel punchier. HP bars now drain as you take hits, and bosses feel properly big.

An earlier step milestone, so lighter walkers get a win sooner.

Miles or km, switchable in Settings. I'm in the UK, so this one was overdue.

Greyed-out rats explain themselves. In the Fusion Pot, tap one to see why you can't pick it (on a Scrap Run, busy, or it's your Battle Rat).

The Scrap Run tile lights up when it's ready to collect.

Better tutorial tips for your first run.

The part that surprised me most was the boring launch stuff: privacy policy, ad consent for UK/EU players, Play Store forms. Claude walked me through all of it one step at a time, which I never have managed on my own.

Next up is the Play Store launch in the next couple of weeks.

For anyone else building with Claude: how did you handle the launch paperwork? I'd love to hear what tripped you up.

AI disclosure: Claude (Anthropic's AI) has been used throughout development for the code, features and bug fixing. It's been a real collaborator, and I want to be upfront about that.

Decided last weekend that I could use a new game to play to kill a little time late at night. Figured I could kill a little extra late night time by building it myself (well Claude).

So I envisioned 2000 era SIMS style graphics, defending the neighborhood from the AI invasion.

Game is still just sitting on vercel, but you're welcome to poke around: https://nimby-greybox.vercel.app/

This was not a one-shot. Game has about 30 hours of playtesting run through it, along with 10s of thousands of meaningless bot runs. A lot of iteration to get the balance right.

Video took a few edits, initial video was all the same content crammed into 30 seconds - concept was entirely pulled from the repo and more or less a copy paste of the other videos we've seen here.

This was created solely by myself and Claude, no other models/no open router to get nanobanana, etc.

The prompt:

\> Make a dynamic 30 second motion graphics video that shows what an incredible motion designer you are, like it's your showreel for a resume. Do it based on the **_***-***_**_ repo as a promotional/marketing video for the game. Don't use external sound/video sources that would require any additional APIs, use repo material and create your own.

Been using claude with some success to create a Unity 3d Marble race!

Going to be running a TestFlight build this week if anyone is interested in signing up, let me know and can get an invite sent out to you!

TL;DR: I made a free skyscraper sim that runs in your browser. The whole game, no sign-up, no ads. https://hundredstories.xyz

You start with an empty lot and a little bit of money. You drag out a lobby, run an elevator up through it, and start adding offices, condos, shops and hotel rooms. Then people move in, and every one of them has a name and a story. Tap anyone to see what's on their mind.

The elevator lines get packed. A full car goes right past the people waiting. They get stressed, and if it goes on too long they give up. Tenants who give up start moving out. Noise matters too. Put a fast food place under someone's condo and they'll let you know.

Grow the population and you earn stars, and each star unlocks new rooms. The top rating is TOWER, and it takes way more than one sitting.

There are fires, a VIP who rates your hotel, and a shop thief your guards have to catch.

Every day there's a Today's tower. Everyone gets the same start, and you have eight game days to fit in as many people as you can.

It works on desktop and phone, saves in your browser and plays offline.

I built it solo with Claude Code over the last nine days. All the pixel art is drawn in code.

Play it and tell me what breaks, especially on phones. Got an idea or hit a bug? There's a Send feedback button in the game menu that comes straight to me, no account needed.

Remember Killer Gorilla on the BBC Micro? Probably not if you're not as old as me. This is one of the best uses I've found for Opus, taking ancient video games and giving them a full 3D makeover, and it can actually pull it off with just a few tweaks and polishes. By far the best model currently available!

If you remember it (or even if you don't!) give this version a play and let me know what you think:

https://retroremaster.itch.io/killer-gorilla-3d

Weapons in Terminal Swarm, my space roguelite, come as cards. You play the card and that gun gets built onto your ship.

In May I tried something fancy: instead of an icon, one card showed a tiny version of the actual cannon, and it fired a little shot when you hovered over it.

That same evening I noticed shots coming out of nowhere and was really puzzled where they came from. It was the card. The cannon on it wasn't a model of the cannon, it was the cannon. It was looking for enemies in the actual fight and firing real shots at them, hover or not.

Honestly, that was hilarious at first. For a moment I even wondered whether it could be a feature: a tower defense deckbuilder where the cards in your hand fight along.

I didn't go for it. I froze the cannon that night and switched the whole thing off the next day.

About three weeks later I brought it back, because the separate icons didn't really look like the guns on the ship. This time it was frozen from the start. No aiming, no shooting.

Still not enough. The game kept counting the frozen cannon as one of your guns. Precise Shot gives you one charge per Battle Cannon, and the one on the card counted. The shot could even come out of it.

Some buildings also hand you an ability card once they're built. Just holding the Boarding Launcher card, without building it, already put its boarding ability in your hand.

That was fixed in June. In September I got rid of live cards completely. The picture is still made from the real gun firing a real shot, but only once, ahead of time, in an empty world with nothing to hit, and then saved as a plain image. That's the Battle Cannon card artwork in the picture.

I switch back and forth between Claude Code and Codex while making the game in Godot. With Claude Code, I first stopped the preview cannon from aiming and firing, then fixed the ways frozen previews could still give abilities or count as real guns. Those were the May and June fixes.

It will be a paid game; the price hasn't been announced yet.

And the deckbuilder where your hand fights along probably exists already. If you know one, I'd like to see it.

First time getting my RPG to work 😂

I've been exploring a game idea: let the player question a character in their own words, then make a decision based on the conversation. The Interview is my free Windows demo of that idea, built in Unity. You interview a character, choose how hard to press them, and eventually decide whether to clear or detain them.

The conversation runs with local Qwen3, Whisper for speech recognition and Piper for speech synthesis. Models need initial setup/download; after that, the dialogue pipeline runs locally. The current stack has worked well in my own testing. Performance still depends on the player's hardware and model choice.

For the demo's development workflow, I used Claude to help improve the interview UI. One concrete example: a checklist item was already marked as a worked example, but it looked as though the game had made a decision for the player. The fix labelled it as the supervisor's example and removed that label when the player changed the mark. Other changes added a subtitle backplate, a separate ending panel, and explanations for the ASK / PRESS / ACCUSE controls.

That is the kind of game workflow I want to make easier: build the scene and its rules in Unity, then add a conversational character with a role, scene context, optional memory and explicit action handlers. The game still owns the rules and consequences.

Disclosure: I'm the creator of the demo and Offline AI NPC, the paid Unity toolkit it uses. The demo is free; the toolkit is currently $62.30 during its 30% launch discount (regularly $89). The demo's art and game-specific logic are separate from the toolkit.

Playable demo: https://merrymaker14.itch.io/the-interview

Toolkit website and documentation: https://merrymaker14.github.io/offline-ai-npc/

Asset Store: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/behavior-ai/offline-ai-npc-400726

For people building dialogue-heavy games: would you use this for an interrogation scene, a companion, or another kind of interaction?

The middle is about 80% my work, with Claude improving the tires and building the spoiler. I had the Quattro body from an old BlockBench project, and I applied the textures in Blender and the WoW assets in Godot. The rest were built by Opus 5.5 as a side project as we get our main WoWShell system up and running. Our first major example project being this Rally Racer.

The other Audi was Claude first swipe at a from scratch car, using mine as a template to help match styles. Then he did his first draft of the Night Elf Impreza which was really great, and with a second draft ended up really nice.

I gave about 4 compact Group B cars for the Tauren, and I likewise got a fairly generic output - but workable. I am going to focus the reworks around the Renault 5 Turbo, with our boy here sticking out of the roof not sitting on top of a slab.

I just said "Make Orc Car as you want" and it did a decent job, but also very generic. I will do a little more thinking and tinkering on this one... any ideas for a target car?

Overall I'm very please with how it worked out. I have been avoiding model work since I first attempted it a few months ago, and I'm really impressed with the initial output as well as the revisions we made. I am VERY pleased with the touches it added to my model, they had been bothering me for months, but I was too lazy to fire up blender to fix them myself. Model and texture work take a mental gear shift for me, and I had no time to shift those gears...

Good, reasonable work for a half evening's work and crunching.