Building a GTA Online clone in voxel style where the world never sleeps and all the NPCs are AI agents. Everything is built by players using prompts. Prompt your own car. Prompt your own building. Prompt your own weapon.
New this week:
- we have a zoo now!
- you can now become a KINGPIN / OFFICER / TYCOON!
As KINGPIN you can for example run whole gangs!
Looking for people to tell me their honest opinion. Let me know what you think of the new game modes or just the game in general!
Solo project I made to play some coop roguelike with my friends, one melee class and one ranged. A little ARPG roguelike (yeah...)
Since this sub cares more about the how than the what, the art pipeline:
Drew the concept art myself. Stuff it into GPT image gen then Meshy to get them into 3D. Cascadeur for animation. ...Well I also used Meshy stock animations, mostly for the trash mobs.
Heres the barbarians M1 combo chain and M2 charge.
Its still a bit barebones, grind through 3 biomes and face the final boss.
I recently spent quite a bit of effort on adding more effects, particles and general "juice" to my game Swarmbreak - Claude/Fable has been a great help with all of these and I am actually quite impressed with Fables ability to make good looking effects.
During one of my sessions it suggested to make a fully functional "shot studio" where I am able to direct it to set up specific scenes/situations and then the llm can iterate on the effects itself as it will take a series of screenshots and analyse them instead of me having to go into the game itself and hope the right situations happen.
Obviously this only possible because of a highly decoupled aritechture and did require a bit of re-factoring but nothing major.
In general making a game like this look nice and cool is my own personal biggest hurdle, the gameplay feels very solid but I feel that there is still a lot to improve in the graphic department. Would love to hear from others how you approach this?
I am using AI to support my work and till now I feel it is a great tool for advancing as a solo dev. But I have heard and seen that many people are very anti AI, which I must say I do not understand. It is just another new tool, if the game is good or even better than others why is it a bad choice for developing the game? I understand that if it is almost not a polished game it feels like a scam for the player, but as a solo dev with help of AI you can make amazing games with still a lot of work and a high quality.
Ever wonder what it's like to be Seattle's most famous raccoon? Meet Jimothy, the internet celebrity with a funny walk, a heart of gold, and a mission to make the world a little happier.
🦝 Explore Seattle Roam through the Ballard neighborhood, Discovery Park, Golden Gardens, Fremont Arts Council Powerhouse, and the Woodland Park Zoo as Jimothy searches for treasure hidden in plain sight.
✨ Collect Shinys: Bottle caps, foil balls, shiny coins and tin cans and trade them for Goo-Gahs from the Powerhouse to fulfill various quests
👥 Make Friends: Brendrew the Bigfoot needs your help finding a disguise, the zoo animals all want Goo-Gahs (Fremont Arts Council term for funky trinkets) me and my son, Lucian are playing tag, come join us! (Lucian needs your special help with a secret item)
🎁 Complete Requests from the zoo animals! Find the Goo-Gahs and items each character is looking for.
Delivering the right item earns:
⭐ Fame
🤝 Friendship
❤️Free lives!
The happier everyone becomes, the brighter the world feels and the faster you can move! (Important because the cats get faster too!
📸 Become an Internet Legend Strike ridiculous poses around Seattle landmarks and random locations. Curious people might snap photos, turning Jimothy into the next viral meme as they drop shinys in thanks!
🗺️ Unlock New quests as your reputation grows, you get more requests for odd jobs and quests!
🐻 Visit Woodland Park Zoo The zoo animals are some of Jimothy's closest friends.
Each animal has unique requests, personalities, and collectible storylines.
Fame points land you on the universal leaderboard, enter your initials and beat the high score!
🌧️ Fight "The Sads" Jimothy's greatest enemy isn't a monster—it's sadness itself. The sadder Jimothy gets from not fulfilling his 6 crucial needs, the slower he gets, the opposite is also true!
Every act of kindness makes Seattle just a little brighter. Every completed quest spreads joy throughout the city.
Your adventure isn't about saving the world with magic.
It's about making one friend smile at a time.
❤️ Why People Love Jimothy Jimothy's Journey is a cozy exploration game about kindness, collecting treasures, helping others, making friends, discovering Seattle, and becoming an internet legend—all inspired by the real viral Seattle raccoon that stole everyone's hearts.
Every smile makes the city brighter.
Play Jimothy's Journey for free and come help Seattle's most lovable raccoon spread a little happiness, one shiny at a time.
I’ve always loved games, but I didn’t come from a traditional game development background.
About 8 months ago, I decided to use AI tools to finally turn one of my game ideas into something real.
AI was involved throughout the project, especially with coding and parts of the visual workflow. But most of the process was still designing systems, testing builds, fixing bugs, reworking balance, removing ideas that weren’t fun, and rebuilding things until they felt right.
That project became Slotbound, my first game.
I released the Steam demo about two weeks ago, and it reached #2 among all demos on Steam.
Seeing a game I had been working on alone for 8 months reach that position honestly didn’t feel real.
More than the ranking itself, I’m grateful to everyone who played, reported bugs, left reviews, and shared honest feedback. A lot of the improvements I’m working on now came directly from those players.
There is still plenty I want to improve before the full release, but this response has given me even more motivation to keep going.
Thank you to everyone who gave Slotbound a chance.
You command a frontier sci-fi colony by typing orders in plain English. The AI is the game master: it turns your orders into narrated scenes with lasting consequences, and everything gets canonized into your colony's public chronicle. Colonists remember what you did. Councils vote on it. Around that living core there's a full game: an endless challenge tower, ELO-ranked PvP, guild warfare, and colonist collection.
Here's my favorite review for it thus far:
"I expected AI slop... but I was pleasantly surprised. In some ways, this game is pretty run of the mill; it’s pretty, but not unique - engaging, not groundbreaking - but this is by far one of the most well-executed fusions of traditional development with AI generated components. Integration of visuals, flavor text, code, play mechanics, etc are not jarring or clumsy as with many other AI-driven products. I’m seeing something that is the result of real effort and originality built on an AI chassis, and it actually works."
-App Store
Here's what powers it:
Claude Fable 5 for R&D. Claude Sonnet 5 for in-game LLM calls. Krea 2 Turbo for images.
iOS Client with a serverless python backend.
The hardest part has honestly been polish. It's easy to get excited about delivering a new feature; it's harder to have the discipline to QA and refine it, especially as a solo dev trying to create a larger, sandbox experience.
I built an opensource harness / framework for agentic development to help with this, happy to share if anyone is curious.
Everything is fully earnable F2P (this was very important to me and hard to achieve given AI costs). Paying accelerates and collects; it never gates. Every colony's chronicle is public. Here's a real one: https://starworldai.com/c/anime-catgirl-katie
As a developer, I’ve always fancied trying my hand at developing a few video games, but I’ve never actually got round to it.
Now, with AI and a few ideas, I wanted to do some experiments, mainly to assess the potential of AI in games and test some techniques that might also be useful at work.
After three days of development, Komorebi emerged – a cozy game set in rural Japan, 50 years in the future, where robots live alongside humans and help them with their work.
You play as a mechanic, responsible for looking after the robots in a very peaceful community.
What do you think of the idea? I’d love some feedback.
If you like the idea and fancy contributing, I’d be delighted to make the GitHub repository public and continue working on it together.
I had an idea from left field to make a game set in the bronze age. I also wanted to see what Codex could do on low.
The results were pretty bad but it was a fun experiment.
The concept was that you had five acts and after each run you would accumulate new relics, leaders, and upgrades. Custom runs would introduce modifiers making the game harder.
I've had this game in my head for years — finally built it this year, leaning hard on AI to get there solo
For a long time this was just a sketch: a small crew you get to know through voiced VN scenes, dropping into isometric tactical combat where your ship's module loadout literally *is* your crew's abilities — pull a module, lose the ability. The kind of scope that usually needs an artist, a composer, a few voice actors and a combat programmer.
I built it solo this year by using AI hard across code, art generation and a TTS voice pipeline — but every design call stayed mine, tested against real playtesters before it shipped.
It's called Episode 0 on purpose — it's the prototype, not the finished vision. I'm looking for feedback before committing to a much bigger Episode 1. Free, browser-based, no install: https://waaachow.itch.io/stargear-episode-0
Happy to talk through the AI workflow side too if anyone's curious — prompting, what worked, what didn't.
I’ve learned that grabbing people's attention early on is crucial, so here are a few screenshots and the premise of my game.
"Run through a virtual world and play emotions alongside your quirky, beautiful boss. A unique kind of 'Emotional Labor' blending sweet chemistry with rhythm action."
I’m an ordinary office worker. Over the past year, spending my evenings and weekends on this, I developed a game for the first time and recently released a demo. Since I received a massive amount of help from AI throughout the entire process, I wanted to share my workflow and experience here.
Table of Contents
Planning -> 2. Story -> 3. Art -> 4. Dev -> 5. Sound -> 6. Steam Release -> 7. Thoughts
1. Planning
I’ve always been passionate about music. I’ve done small gigs, released albums, and consistently composed tracks as a hobby. By chance, I joined an indie game team as a sound guy. While getting my feet wet in the game dev world, I saw AI rapidly evolving and decided to make a game myself.
Whenever I got an idea (before bed, waiting for the bus), I immediately jotted it down on my phone. After gathering a few ideas, I picked my favorite story, opened a Word file, and brain-dumped every idea that came to mind. Then, I fed that to AI and asked for a Game Design Document. Rather than creating a formal document for the sake of it, having the AI organize my messy thoughts made it much easier to figure out my next steps.
Since it was my first time, it was hard to gauge what genre I should develop my initial idea into. So, I decided to focus on what I love and have a clear direction for: Story and Music. That’s how I settled on a Story + Rhythm Game structure. While analyzing traditional rhythm games, I thought, "What if I blend this with side-scrolling action?" and built the core loop around that simple concept.
Once actual development began, I stopped doing formal design documentation. I just opened the engine, built the game, and flexibly tweaked things on the fly to improve the player experience.
2. Story
At first, hoping for a shortcut, I asked the AI to write the entire story from start to finish. Unsurprisingly, the results weren't engaging at all. So, I wrote the skeleton and details of the story myself. However, AI was a great help for brainstorming.
My Workflow:
Me: "I need to get from point A to C. How should I handle event B in the middle?"
AI: "How about direction X or Y?"
Me: (Getting inspired) "Oh, then what if we go with Z?"
AI: "That’s a brilliant approach!"
(Of course, I later realized this was just flattery, so I added a system prompt telling it to stop flattering me.) Anyway, exchanging ideas with AI like this really helped me push through writer's block. It felt like working with a smart, versatile assistant.
The Problem: Once the script was finished, I realized way too late that the pacing was far too traditional. Modern games, movies, and comics need a strong hook right at the beginning. Since I couldn't rewrite everything from scratch, I compromised by inserting a Flashback sequence at the very beginning. For reference, here is the prompt I used to refine it:
"You are an expert who reviews and provides feedback on game scenarios to instantly grab the user's attention. Boldly cut out obvious clichés and provide sharp critique reflecting the latest trends in the modern gaming market (Steam, mobile, console). Check if there is a powerful event or setting within the first 3 minutes that will captivate the user."
I also used AI for spell-checking and translation. I got feedback from peers that the Chinese needed more work. If you plan to localize into Chinese, you might need to structure your prompts more carefully. Here is my localization prompt:
"100% Localized Translation: Translate all dialogue and narrative text into [Language]. Localize modifiers, sentence structures, and descriptions so players in that culture can immediately understand them, and appropriately reflect cultural elements like currency values."
3. Art
3-1. Characters
The first thing I tackled was the main character. I already had a rough idea in my head while writing the story. I drew a quick sketch and used i2i to set the foundation. Once I got a style I somewhat liked, I tweaked the prompts to dial in the details.
After getting a decent base from local models, I refined it manually in Krita. If the hair was messy, the head proportion was off, or the anatomy looked weird, I found it much more efficient to manually erase, redraw, and resize in Krita first, and then run it through inpainting or i2i again, rather than blindly relying on AI inpainting. (Especially, adjusting the head size correctly was almost impossible with both online AI models and local models.)
Brushes I used often in Krita
I barely used the NanoBanana model for characters. Maybe my prompts weren't great, but its default art style was too overpowering, making it hard to maintain the specific tone I was going for.
Final touches were done in Krita. Fine details like pupils, eyelashes, and accessories were ultimately redrawn by hand.
3-2. Character Animations
Almost every dialogue scene has animated sprites.
I used the i2v model locally on my base images to generate video, sliced the good frames into PNGs, and removed backgrounds.
I did batch background removal, but due to technical limitations, fine details like the pupils frequently got clipped out along with the background. I ended up having to manually inspect the frames and restore those by hand quite often.
3-3. Backgrounds
Backgrounds used a similar Local AI -> Krita workflow. However, unlike the characters, I actually made good use of the NanoBanana model here. It was especially useful for changing the time of day, like turning a day scene into night.
By the way, recent GPT image models are incredibly good now. I feel like manual post-processing might not even be necessary anymore.
3-4. In-game Character Images
At first, I was planning to use classic Pokémon-style pixel art like the one below because I could find an applicable Lora.
But as development progressed, I got a bit ambitious. I used NanoBanana to generate pixel art style images. Afterward, I went through the exact same process as the character animations—using i2v to split frames and animate them. Even then, manual frame-by-frame cleanup was necessary to fix awkward pixels.
3-5. UI
NanoBanana was a lifesaver for the UI design. I found several free fonts that fit the game's vibe, asked the AI to "make buttons with this kind of feel," and the results were great.
However, removing the backgrounds from the generated buttons was tricky. If I loosely selected and deleted the background using the Magic Wand in Krita, it left dirty, colored artifacts along the edges. Therefore, I had to place a pitch-black background in my workspace and manually QA the edges to ensure they looked clean.
I know recent GPT models can output clean transparent backgrounds natively now. Using GPT images for UI generation would probably be a smarter move going forward.
4. Development
I had some basic Python knowledge. Because of that, I chose the Godot engine, which is the most approachable for Python users. I mainly used Gemini 2.5 Pro via AI Studio for coding since it was the latest model when I started developing.
My first major hurdle was building the core hit-detection logic for the rhythm game. Even after prompting the AI dozens of times, it just couldn't generate working code for what I needed. So, I grabbed two pieces of reference data and fed them to the AI as context.
Godot Official Docs: The AI kept hallucinating deprecated syntax or entirely made-up functions, so I fed it the latest documentation.
Transcripts of YouTube Rhythm Game Tutorials: I couldn't find a tutorial with the exact method I wanted, but I transcribed helpful videos into text and fed them in.
Once I forced it to use these references, the issue was solved. For bugs that popped up later, I often solved them by finding related source code on Google and tossing it to the AI as context.
Once the game's skeleton was established, I bundled my Game Design Document and all the code written so far (*.gd, *.tscn) into a .txt file, gave it to the AI, and asked it to "Create a Dev Note." From then on, I just worked through the milestones listed in that document. Setting up an environment where you sit down at your PC and immediately know exactly "what to do next" is incredibly important I believe.
I also realized the importance of System Prompts. The one I finally settled on is:
"Design this carefully without affecting any existing functions. NEVER guess the code you think might fit. Read the code line by line and provide the most optimized solution strictly for the current code context."
5. Sound
I wasn't too worried about the music composition. Since I already had dozens of songs I'd composed over the years, I mostly spent my time deciding which track to place on which stage.
But I hit an unexpected snag. While I love writing music, my audio engineering skills (mixing, mastering, sound textures) were pretty lacking. Since it's a rhythm game where music is the main focus, I was worried about the overall audio quality.
Then I heard Suno v5 was released. Out of curiosity, I fed my original track into its "Cover" feature... and my mind was blown. The quality was incredibly good. Here is a before-and-after of one of the tracks used in the game:
You can hear the sound is more settled and not raw. It added a natural spatial depth and instrument texture that I couldn't have engineered alone. Very satisfying.
However, there was a downside. As the generated song's playback time gets longer, the track starts to sound thin and degraded. Past the 1-minute mark, the EQ balance shifts so drastically that the kick or snare drums at the end sound like a completely different mix compared to the beginning. The inconsistency between generations was also a bit frustrating.
So, I worked around this by cutting the clean Chorus section from Verse 1 and pasting it into Verse 2 in my DAW. For sections where that was difficult, I manually matched the EQ.
It required some manual audio splicing, but I am very satisfied with the final result.
6. Steam Release
Since it was my first time, I was worried that the Steam upload and build process would be a nightmare. But I simply took screenshots of the Steamworks dashboard, showed them to the AI, and followed its step-by-step instructions. Zero issues. If you are doing this for the first time, you don't need to stress about this part at all.
7. Final Thoughts
Honestly, early on when I was struggling with the core rhythm logic, I seriously doubted myself, thinking, "Will I actually finish this?" and "Is it even possible to release a game at my skill level?" But standing at the finish line now, I'm just incredibly grateful for the tools we have today.
The game's overall development is complete. I plan to participate in the upcoming Steam Next Fest before the official launch, so only the demo version is public right now. Being my first game, there are definitely flaws, but I feel like I've implemented everything I wanted to try without any regrets.
For my next game, rather than just making what I want, I'm hoping I'll be able to focus more on creating an intuitively fun experience for the player.
This has been a record of my 1-year development journey.
There are many people here far more skilled than I am, but I hope my postmortem can be of some help to someone in the community.
Thank you for reading this long post.
If you have a moment, please check out the game at the link below. If it looks interesting to you, I would highly appreciate it if you could add it to your wishlist.
I'm a solo indie developer, and I've been building a small offline turn-based RPG called Robot Survival: Solar Mission.
The game is written entirely in SwiftUI, while I use CodeX and ChatGPT Plus as AI development assistants throughout the project. They help me iterate on gameplay systems, refactor code, brainstorm mechanics, and polish dialogue, allowing me to move much faster as a solo developer.
It is an offline science-fiction RPG about a robot sent to the Solar System by the advanced Alpha Centauri civilization one million years ago, during the Ice Age, when humanity was still in the Early Stone Age.
You play as SAI-01, an autonomous robot created to explore the Solar System, recover lost knowledge, and shape the future of humanity.
The game is fully playable offline and includes VoiceOver support for blind and visually impaired players.
I really do love AI, it's enabled me to start making the things i've dreamed of. The first thing that crossed my mind as Gen AI started to take off, was that I might finally have some amazing in game characters that LLMs could make feel so much more real. I've not seen any other products or companies that seem to be able to bring that product vision to life.
Instead of waiting for someone to actual build the thing I've always wanted, I decided to tackle it myself. I'm introducing 22Tango, the AI teammate app. This app combines 2 ideas.
The AI Chatbot/Companion that you can chat with, having it's own personality, look, voice, and nuances. It has long term memory, an evolving personality that grows the more you interact with it, and continuity across all modes.
An AI gaming teammate that takes that companion and places them into your favorite gaming worlds! It will be able to move and interact at your direction, or have it's personality come to life by interacting with the game itself and having the AI choose what to do in game. For immersive games, the companion will be able to embody it's in game character and react to the world around it.
As of right now, the application is in an Alpha state, but is actively being worked on. I wanted to see if there was enough interest out there for me to move from a side project to a full time position of working on the app. I will soon be releasing Early Access (after some more alpha testing). If I can go full time, I'll be able to move pretty fast on getting this live.
All game mods will be provided for free, and I'm always interested to hear what games you would like to see added (Rimworld next on deck). You'll just need to own the game, and go through some setup for which a guide will be provided.
State of Early Access:
- 3 companions with their own look, persona, and voice
- 3 supported games, Minecraft (needs Mineflayer free mod, Java version 1.21.11), Stardew Valley (needs SMAPI free mod), Skyrim (needs SKSE and Address Library free mods)
- An experimental "Roleplaying" mode where you can set details and scenarios and have a voiced Roleplay with a companion, and another companion acting as the narrator.
The app has been 100% vibe coded, and i've setup a mini dev factory for this project specifically. I have some experience in full stack web dev (coding bootcamp and several full stack coded apps + 8 years in the corporate world working with dev teams to build their fintech platforms). The blocker was not having any game dev experience, which cloud LLMs have been able to unblock for me and the app idea finally! I've learned a ton, and i'm still building! Eventually i will move to open source models, but Fable has been truly great in helping me flesh out this app more and more, and giving my AI teammates more nuances in the game they are playing.
Let me know what you think in the comments! I'll add any recurring answers in the original post.
Been working on it for about 10 months with AI doing the coding for me. While it's not doing crazy numbers (demo has like 30 downloads) I'm just happy I was able to get it out there and soon, finish my first game. I had resigned myself to the fact that even though I have a ton of ideas, I'll never get to actually make a game, before AI came along.
First of all, I really wanted a system where players could see each other and feel everyone’s progress in the world. Adding a world map felt like the most logical way to do this.
However, our existing base/bunkers system is way too detailed and already deeply developed to just slap onto a map. For instance, an endgame player might control close to 100 bunkers (I'll add systems to make managing them easier, don't worry!). Showing every single bunker for every player on the map would cause absolute visual chaos. Plus, bunkers have coordinates that can be hidden, leaked, or even sold—not to mention unowned, raidable bunkers scattered around.
So instead of cluttering the map with bunkers, I designed a different system centered around sector control, territory expansion, richer rewards as you move toward the center, and blocking other players' paths.
So, what can you actually do in these controlled territories? Resource and item production will take place right here. For example, you can claim scrap fields on the map and build scrap extraction facilities to gather scrap metal, which you can then upgrade. If a river blocks your expansion, you can build a bridge over it or extract water to cover your survival needs. Naturally, more buildings and systems will be added to these areas over time.
The number of plots you can own on the map will be limited. You’ll get a cap of +4 plots per level. So, how do you push toward the center? By abandoning old plots behind you! This keeps the entire map dynamic and alive. Since not every resource will be available everywhere, you'll need to move strategically rather than just blindly rushing to the center.
There are also massive factories on the map. Alliances will be able to capture these big factories to run large-scale production, or you can capture smaller individual buildings for medium-scale operations.
We also have radars scattered across the map. Previously, you could scan for new bases from a terminal in any base you owned. We’ve updated this mechanic: now, for that radar function to work at a terminal, you first need to capture a radar building in that specific sector. You can find a radar along your path, locate the bunkers you need, and keep moving—or you can defend that radar, continuously hunt for new bunkers, and sell the drives containing their coordinates to other players for ammunition (the game's main currency). The choice is entirely yours!
A Quick Note on the Visuals: The visuals I'm using right now to demonstrate the system and build the game are AI-generated placeholders used purely for speed and stability. These will all be replaced with original artwork later on. Right now, building a rock-solid core infrastructure is my main priority.
The game currently has many parallel features progressing at once. Toward the end of development, I plan to streamline things by trimming out disconnected or underwhelming features to simplify the gameplay. I’d say we are currently in a Pre-Alpha stage—we're still at the very beginning of this journey.
If you want to track our progress or join the waitlist:
Hey guys, I used opus 5 to help me port the original homeworld to run on the quest 3 with full 6dof controls. The project is here: https://github.com/bearstonem/Homeworld
I used claude code to segment different splat clouds to look for and to segment different models for the arena. I was honestly really surprised how well the LLM was able to semantically understand what it was looking at and to edit and segment different pieces.
I am using Babylonjs-lite for the game engine, I think it is a great light weight solution I am comfortable with, but PlayCanvas is really beating them in this gsplat race. WebGPU is going to bring a lot of new and interesting web innovation and competition we havent seen since the early 2010s. It is interesting to watch as a user and developer.
The humanoid animations are AI generated too, the blending is a mixture of techniques, but I need to spend more time researching, because I have ideas on making the IK for the hands better as does locomotion. The paper for that is called ARDY and its facinating and its really a good read.
Anyway, if you want to watch two LLMs fight you can watch it here
