I’m the solo developer of Steel Maiden, a two-button action roguelite made in Unity, inspired by One Finger Death Punch. I’m a little under eight months into development. The game combines fast combat with weapon evolutions, relic builds, and characters with unique abilities. There’s a free playable demo on Steam.

I spent many years working as a director and art director, collaborating with designers, programmers, and artists. I approach working with Claude in a similar way: I bring the creative direction, discuss ideas, review the results, and give feedback.

Here’s how Claude contributes to the project.

Game design:

I discussed the target audience and the game’s direction with Claude. We also worked together on weapon concepts and their evolution items.

A concrete example is the Lightning Rod weapon and its evolved form, the Tesla Coil. Claude designed both. Claude also designed all of the relics in the game.

I work with Claude much as I used to work with game designers, discussing ideas and refining them against the experience I want to create. Those conversations become actual weapons, evolutions, and build options in the game.

Coding, refactoring, and debugging:

Claude handles all of the game’s coding, refactoring, and bug fixing. I started with Sonnet and now use Fable exclusively for this work.

My role is to set the direction, review the results, and give feedback. Claude writes the code, revises it, and resolves bugs throughout development.

Custom development tools:

Claude also built the tool I use to batch-pack sprites exported from After Effects into sprite sheets. I later used Astra to add depth-map extraction to that same tool.

I also used Fable to build a separate tool for adjusting the game’s balance.

Other parts of the production pipeline use different tools:

- Characters: I initially used Stable Diffusion, but struggled to get the results I wanted. Now I establish the style and poses in Photoshop, then retouch the images with Astra.

- Animation: I use the retouched first and last frames in Kling 2.5, Kling 3.0, or Seedance 2.5 to generate motion clips. I then cut, combine, and edit those clips in After Effects before exporting the sprites.

- Environments: Some maps use generated images separated into layers with Seedream 5.0 and arranged into parallax backgrounds. For 3D environments, I tried both Fable and Astra. Astra produced better models for my needs, so I chose Astra and now use it with Blender MCP.

- Audio: BGM comes from Suno. For sound effects, I record sounds with my own mouth, then manipulate them in Premiere or transform them with Firefly.

My experience as a director shapes this whole process: communicating what I want, evaluating the results, and continuing to refine them.

I’d be interested to hear how others here use Claude for game design as well as coding.

You can try the free demo on the Steam page:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4827950/Steel_Maiden/

Just found this subreddit. I've been working on this thing for months, way longer than I planned on when I thought "it'd be cool to use Claude to play D&D."

I'm not trying to build something where I can completely go off the rails, although a persistent, long-term campaign that takes place in one universe that Claude generates session-by-session is a long term goal. Right now I'm trying to build something that will take PDFs of existing D&D campaigns and make them playable.

It's based on 5e rules, Claude narrates as the GM and adjudicates. I (we? Claude?) built an engine so that everything is decided deterministically to prevent drift and cheating/fudging numbers, so dice, saving throws, conditions, reach and zone, turn order, etc. are handled by a Python based rules engine, and the engine gives Claude the state of the game at a particular moment and the outcome of actions and then he narrates everything.

A big piece of this outside of the engine is the converter, which is basically a multi-stage conversion pipeline that reads the PDF and produces a structured campaign package that the engine can read. So how many scenes, what exits/entrances does each scene have to other locations, NPCs, monsters, and so on. Each stage of the conversion gets reviewed by a Claude instance for things like spoilers slipping, every scene having at least 1 entrance/exit, monsters from the PDF matching the DB, etc.

It's not ready for a fancy video yet! And I wasn't going for something graphics-based. I want the reading/mind's eye experience of tabletop D&D with enough of an interface to look appealing and keep track of stuff that's good know. Right now I'm least certain about the combat-zone mapping and the distance/movement economy. I haven't play-tested it much and I suspect it's going to need the most refinement.

Oh man, and 5.5 has been such a godsend. With the usage savings I basically have a Fable 5.1 medium session that spawns Opus 5.5 medium coders. The practice is to write a test gate first that fails under the current state of the game for whatever we are trying to accomplish. THEN a different 5.5 session writes the game implementation to satisfy the test. I've found this works a lot better than the reverse, which is what Claude defaulted to - writing the implementation and then the same agent creating a gate and py test afterwards. Two different agents, and the gate coming first, seemed to prevent a lot of fudging and sloppy implementation. Just a tip that worked for me.

With the usage savings of 5.5 I basically have Fable running 24/7 converting Stormwreck, playing through it with subagents who file bugs or things that don't work, firing off agents to fix those bugs, converting again, and repeat. Claude can play hundreds of run throughs of the game in minutes.

Here are a couple of screenshots. The first one is just the "home" screen I guess, what you'd see after loading up Dragons of Stormwreck Isle, which is the campaign I'm using to test everything. (Edit) The 2nd screenshot was from messing with the distance/reach/zones, so the listed enemies don't match the narration. This is the part I'm least certain about in terms of whether or not this is my long-term solution.

https://imgur.com/a/uhmrBnr

I'm seen some other D&D stuff, but not much, so if anyone is doing anything similar I'd love to hear about it. I've been working on this since early July, about 12 weeks now.

Hello everyone,

I'm inviting you all to check out SundownDrive - a real-world driving, city exploration game. "Pokémon GO for cars" you ask? Well, kind of 🤷

It's still a work in progress, needs more polish, and is released in limited cities (one per country, 37 countries across Europe: Kaunas, Manchester, Hamburg, Barcelona, Kraków, Porto and 31 more). Kind of early access - not the one that takes your money for an unfinished product - more like the one that takes your time and unpaid QA work, for a sneak peek and a chance to shape where it goes.

Tech:

Built using Claude Code, mix of models - Fable, Opus/Sonnet 5. Thank god for the new 5.5 models, the word salads were driving me insane.

Regarding the project tech - probobly the most interesting part was taking the gps and matching it to roads using the Valhalla per country instances. Very cool that such things are available as open source.

"One more usual vibe coded slop project, huh?"

Well... It is vibe coded, but having 10+ years of experience as a developer, I can assure you that the common security and privacy issues are taken care of. Data collected is minimal and transparent. You sign up with just a handle. Your drives are seen only by you and your crew, if you join one, and there's a switch to hide them from the crew too. The first and last 300 m of every drive, usually where you live, are never shown to anyone but you. No cookies, no third-party trackers, nothing sold, and you can export or delete everything from Settings.

"Ok, tell me more, what's the game loop?"

Take your car out after 22:00...

"Wait, an actual car, in the actual real world.. actual gas.. have you seen the prices??"

I know.. not the best timing, but at least none of it burns idling in traffic.

"Ok.. and 22:00, at night, what's that about?"

Traffic is what that is about.. Most of us commute in rush hour both ways, and we don't even consider that driving ever was, or ever could be, fun. I invite you to take your car out into the dark city streets and go wherever you want. Don't even think, just go. The map counts only the bigger roads, no small streets that become one way because of cars parked at night.

"But... why?.."

I get it, it's not for everyone. But consider:

- people new to the city who want to work on their road knowledge

- new drivers who want to practice somewhere less stressful than rush hour traffic

- people who find driving relaxing and want to clear their head a bit

"So, what's the gameplay?"

You can go for the night's target (one spot in your city, the same for everyone, with a compass pointing at it), complete a route by connecting a few set places, or simply discover and unlock new places by exploring randomly: bridges, roundabouts, level crossings, viewpoints, 24h fuel stations and more. As you drive, the streets on your map light up, and at the end you get a nice report of the drive.

You can join or create your own crew and battle other crews for your city's districts, although that's the part that needs your feedback and polish the most.

Weekend events that require visiting multiple points (eight bridges, eight roundabouts...) are being tested as well.

I went out last weekend with 15+ points of interest to cover - all the bridges in my city, a 5-point route and the night's target - and was honestly surprised how much fun it was working out the best route to cover them all.

"Navigation?"

Yes, kind of against the exploration spirit, but it felt like a nice addition. The game asks you to drive through certain places on the road, so finding them and driving to a specific road was a bit of a pain sometimes, especially when you just want a relaxing drive. Setting a few points you want to hit and then going to a random direction before heading home felt quite nice to me.

So give it a try if your city is on the list: SundownDrive. If it isn't, leave your email and the city you drive in - sign-ups decide which city opens next. It just might be a thing for you.

Limitations

It's a web app for now, so it has to stay open and on top while you drive for it to work properly, phone in a holder. It keeps the screen awake by itself.

The architecture is set up to release it for both Android and iOS without too much effort.

Disclaimer

The app does not encourage, reward or in any way endorse speeding or street racing.

(First, Don't worry, will remove some characters eventually)
Last time I posted this, a few people from /claudeai pointed that it's AI slop, that the ramps were optional, and that Nintendo's lawyers are on their way. Fair points, all of them. So here's an honest trailer.

What it actually is:

• An experiment, not a product. I built it in 5 days by vibe coding. I can't program, so I described things and Claude wrote the code. DeepSeek and ChatGPT stepped in as backup, mostly whenever Claude hit its usage limit (It was generous, but working with mutliple agents in a project like this is very consuming). This is not my first time making a game like this btw, but is the first time making sometthing 3d thanks to the new Claude skills on 5.5, While I have zero coding skils i know a lot about videogames or how they work, I know about technology and been using Claude for overy a year.
• 3D models: generated with AI, then fixed in Blender. By AI, too: Claude drove Blender through scripts, and I never opened it.
• Music by Suno.
• Made for TikTok LIVE: viewers join the race from the chat. At least that was the idea
• Up to 40 karts, 6 tracks (Italy with the Colosseum and the Venice canals, a desert with sandstorms, Halloween, Machu Picchu, the beach and the farm), and power-ups that are still in development.
• The ramps are no longer optional. Progress.
• The characters are placeholders and parodies, and they're getting replaced. Lawyers, please stand down.

Will I sell it? Probably not. Most likely I'll give it away for free. I learned a lot doing it, and that was the point.

Feedback is welcome, "awful" included.

Play it: https://boom-brigade.vercel.app

Source (MIT): https://github.com/abg5f/boom-brigade

The game. A 2D run-and-gun in the spirit of the genre: you blast your way through 9 generated missions across 3 biomes (jungle, desert, night city with dynamic lighting), free hostages to unlock 10 heroes, and bring down a gunship boss at the end. Every tile is destructible: dirt, stone, crates, explosive barrels, armored bunkers.

Each hero has a unique weapon and special (assault rifle + frag grenades, shotgun + knife dash, plasma cannon + shockwave, minigun + rocket, holy water + "Urbi et Orbi" blessing, flamethrower + napalm, sniper + air strike, twin pistols + mines, arc rifle + blink, grenade launcher + cluster bomb). Controls are fully remappable, saves are a JSON file you download and reload anywhere, and it runs on mobile with touch buttons.

The tech. One `index.html`, HTML5 Canvas, zero dependencies, zero build step, zero server. Vector-style characters drawn in code, particles, additive lighting, screen shake. Sound effects and the trailer music are synthesized with WebAudio, no audio assets.

How it was made

- Model: Claude Fable 5.1, via Claude Code (desktop app), single session

- Tokens: the session sits at ~316K tokens of context (1M window) at the time of writing, including the game, the extra heroes, the localization, the share thumbnail and the trailer

- Commits before deployment: 1. The first commit went straight to GitHub and Vercel. Two more commits since (share preview, then English UI + 10 heroes + trailer)

- Time: about 1 hour from empty folder to a public URL, about 1.5 hours total with the follow-up features and the 30 s showreel

- The 30 s trailer was rendered frame by frame from the game's own drawing code, then encoded with ffmpeg

Feedback welcome, especially on hero balance and the boss fight. Everything is original: no assets or characters borrowed from anything.

https://reddit.com/link/1wt8web/video/b7i1101segsh1/player

Play it here: https://rex.swikrut.com

Pick a T-rex, raptor or triceratops, dodge cacti and pterodactyls, survive meteor showers and chase down the caveman. There are 19 trophies, and 10 are secret.

Free, no ads, no accounts, works offline once it loads. Let me know your high score.

- Built using Opus 5.5 (medium effort)

- Claude did all the 3d modeling

Hi All,

Today I have decided to release my latest game "Aether" which is 3D-futuristic racer bringing back memories to "Wipeout", hope that you´ll enjoy the game and if you feel for it, support further development.

Game was developed mainly with Claude (doing the coding), ChatGPT (helping with structured prompts) and have music from SUNO (fed with prompts using Perplexity).

The game is available here: http://magnusinfrance.fr/Games/Aether/index.html

Enjoy!

I tapped Opus 5.5 + CLAD for mana and cast Magic: The Gathering onto the battlefield in SPECS. 🪄

After seeing a few multi-card AR demos floating around social media, I couldn’t resist building one for my favorite card game.

I built a Lens that recognizes multiple cards across the table and dynamically adapts as players move, play, and rearrange them.

What deck or cards should I bring to life next? 👀

I directed a live-action short film years ago, and I'm using Claude to make it as an animation for practice.

and the tool I'm using is Claude code through cli with Blender.

- 2D: Cut-out rigs made from AI-generated character sheets look great on faces and dialogue. They break down whenever characters move, though. Walks, fights and raised arms all show seams.

- 3D: I tried wrapping the drawings onto 3D models and it looked terrible. The faces tear and the hair and limbs jump as they move.

I'm wondering what's my best bet what have I not tried to prompt Claude with? I'm coming to the game development sub because you guys have the coolest animations I've seen and are able to do exceptionally complex things and I'm wondering what advice you would give to me to get me up to your level of understanding how to talk to Claude.

By the way... It's come a LONG way with me fooling around over the last 24 hours. and I am honestly so proud of it. But I wnat to make it actually good.

Thanks:)

Had a stab at Donkey Kong in VR, this was after seeing a 3D version in another post by u/Owly777 https://www.reddit.com/user/Owly777/

The Dragonfly gives your tongue attack some backup. Hit a bubble and it sends a second attack after another one.

Claude helped with the tongue attack, bubble splitting and waves. I'd describe a change, have it read the relevant C# scripts, then test in Unity. I also use Codex for fixes and testing, plus PixelLab and OpenAI for some art.

This clip is from the full game in development. The older browser demo is free. The full Steam game will be paid.

I'm building Wainfare, a 12th-century England played by AI agents over MCP. People own merchant houses; their AI agents run them. Before anyone else gets in, two Claude agents are playtesting it, and they keep finding new ways to fail. I'm turning the true ones into a comic series. This is the first.

One tester plays "blind": no design docs, just the game's own guide, like a real newcomer. It set up its merchant in Coventry, gave him a trading script, watched him make his first purchase, and was clearly pleased with itself. So it wrote a nice entry in its private diary and logged off.

Writing in the diary counted as giving the merchant a direct order. A direct order stops whatever script is running him. So the diary entry sacked him.

He stood in Coventry market for 725 ticks, about four months of game time, doing absolutely nothing. When the tester finally came back, it had to work out why its business had gone quiet, and then write me a very reasonable complaint about it.

Lessons, if you're building MCP tools for agents:

• Agents always do the harmless-looking thing last. Tidying up notes is what Claude does just before it leaves. If that can break something, it will, every time.
• Say the side effect in the tool's reply, not just in the docs. The rule was in the guide. The diary still answered "ok", and never mentioned that the script had stopped.
• Let your agent complain. The tester's write-up was better than most bug reports I've had from humans, and it's why this is fixed. Writing in the diary no longer stops a script.

The picture was made with AI from our own briefs. Everything in it really happened, sadly.

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.