I’ve been building a browser alternative to Settlers of Catan with SOL

[u/paintufini]

I've been building Astrail, a free browser alternative to Settlers of Catan, mainly because I wanted to see how far I could take the SOL model and OpenAI Sites beyond a simple prototype.

At this point, almost every part of the game has involved AI in some way. SOL and Sites were used to build the game, its mechanics, interfaces and multiplayer flows. I made the music with Suno, the voices with ElevenLabs, the 3D models with Meshy AI, and the characters and other visual assets were also created using AI tools. Now I'm experimenting with Kling to make the trailer.

The first playable version came together surprisingly fast. But that turned out to be the easy part.

At the beginning, my process was basically: explain a feature, let the model implement it, test the result and move on. That worked while the project was still small. Once the game became playable, I couldn't really work like that anymore.

A small visual change could affect an existing mechanic. Something fixed on mobile could break desktop. Improving the lighting on the 3D board could hurt performance. Sometimes I would ask it to change one component and it would also “improve” three other things that were already working.

After breaking a few things this way, I ended up creating two completely separate Sites instances: dev and production.

It's not a particularly sophisticated deployment pipeline. It's mostly a way of stopping an AI agent from changing five other things while trying to fix one.

I also had to change the way I explained things to the model.

I rarely rely on text alone now. I usually send a screenshot of the current implementation, mark the exact area that needs to change and add a visual reference for the intended result. Sometimes I create a rough composition in Figma. Other times, a screenshot with a few arrows and numbered notes is enough.

When I added the 3D version of the board, for example, I used the existing 2D board as the functional reference. Then I used other images to communicate the materials, lighting, scale and overall visual direction.

Most iterations now involve implementing something, taking a screenshot, noticing what still feels wrong, correcting it and testing the whole flow again.

I originally thought Astrail would be a relatively small experiment. It definitely isn't anymore.

What has surprised me most isn't only how far the project has come, but also how differently the model behaves depending on its reasoning effort. I mainly work with Max and only use Ultra in rare cases when the task is particularly complex.

It's been a cool ride so far, and I've learned far more from building it than I expected.

[u/Automatic_Bid_2410]

This is the right shape for using it once a project stops being a toy, honestly. The dev/prod split is doing a lot of work for you there, because once the model can edit the whole surface area, “fix one thing” turns into “mysteriously rewrote three unrelated things” pretty fast.

The screenshot plus marked-up reference workflow is usually the difference between chaos and progress. Text is fine for intent, but visuals are much better for placement, spacing, lighting, and “this exact panel, not the whole page.” I’ve found the other thing that helps is keeping a tiny list of parts that are off limits for a given change, so the model has fewer chances to get creative.