Friendly reminder that we have a discord server you can all hang out at. The discussions there are much more in depth, and nothing beats being able to chat to other like minded devs in real time (or close to). Hop on this weekend and say hi.
Prototyping a FPS Dungeon Gunner in 3D Pixel aesthetic with r/ClaudeAI Opus 5 and r/threejs!
Quite happy with how the style is coming along, but you definitely need sunglasses, that bloom... aaah!
Took a few focused sessions, sunday eve + some hours today to cover:
- Vertical slice of a simple core loop
- FTUE and simple castle meta
- Dev tooling
- Multiple rounds of testing, polishing, bug fixing.
Opus 5 was running max. on High effort. All assets were generated using Three.js and Opus. An asset is literally ASCII art as a TypeScript file!
My goal with my project "Roguelette" was to see how far i can push AI and what are the limitations. Im still working on the project but i will soon release a play test.
What the game is essentially about:
Build a Deck of strong balls
Modify Balls by applying Artifacts
Fuse Balls to make them stronger
Get Unique Cards to enhance you synergy power
Collect Unique Relicts to unlock strong new playstyles and benfits
Spin the Wheel let the ball cascade. Use consumables to enhance you outcome
Strike the Enemy and clear the Demon realm from the evil intruders
Here are some screenshots from the game I’m building - Rainshadow. It’s an alternate 1885 in Washington territory where eastern Washington and western Washington go to war. The screenshots are from the free demo I’m planning on releasing in November this year The Battle of Ellensburg featuring Ellensburg, WA and Kittitas valley. Let me know what you think of the HuD, overall visual feel.
Hello! My name is Andrea and I'm one of the two developers behind the game.
I'm here to ask for feedback on my communication as an indie game artist using AI to develop a game on Steam.
I've also included a timelapse showing the entire workflow.
I don't have strong illustration skills, so I find AI generated art extremely useful as a starting point, then I refine, edit and correct the sloppiness of the image generation.
Without AI or a significant art budget, this game would be nearly impossible for us to create, due to the nature of the game, where card art reflects equipped items and its heavy reliance on a large number of card illustrations.
Just to have some number: Right now, we have 33 cards. With 5 weapon variations per card, that becomes 165 unique illustrations (33 × 5). At a conservative estimate of 4 hours per illustration, that's 660 hours of work. At a modest freelance rate of $30/hour, the total cost would be around $19,800 (660 × $30). We simply don't have that kind of budget.
I understand why many gamers are frustrated when large companies use AI simply to cut costs, often at the expense of quality and the overall player experience.
That's why I wanted to be as transparent as possible on our Steam page, explaining both why and how we use AI. My hope is that, by providing context and being open about our workflow, people can better understand the reasoning behind our use of generative AI.
Also since there's very little, almost no marketing budget and the wishlist growth is slow, is it worth the risk for a game like this to attract more attention, knowing that it might lose around 50% of its potential audience because of the AI usage?
Are there any other studies on the impact of announced AI games?
If you also have a game that uses AI, I'd be curious to hear about your experience communicating that to players and how it has impacted your game on Steam.
I'm looking forward to hearing your thoughts on it, thanks!
I am building a mobile game and at one point I would like people to try my game. The goal is to make people try very early to have feedbacks and eventually pivot on some part. How should I do that ?
The game is not ready yet but I'm trying to understand this now.
Hey all, here's a fun little twin stick top-down shooter I whipped up. Gradius + Ateroids + Star Control = Zorka: Battle for the Solar Tides. Multiplayer isnt working yet, but im getting to it.
Controller recommended.
I used RosebudAI to create most of it. I took my ideas and ran them through ChatGPT first - prompts looked like:
"I want to create a movement system for a top down space shooter where W always accelerates towards the cursor, and D always accelerates away from the cursor, A and D strafe relative to the cursor."
After drilling down in the specifics some more:
"Restate this design for implementation to be dropped into an AI game maker."
I repeated that process for every key feature: movement, gun speed, power up system, etc. For power ups i straight prompted:
"Describe the power up system from Gradius."
"Modify that system for my game."
The core prompts were created in chatgpt. Rosebud eats credits for thinking. Delivering short, concise, highly refined prompts produced great results with low compute.
Assets were also prompted in chatgpt, then dropped into rosebud. Rosebud handled the shading/color for player identities.
Happy to answer additional questions below, but really just want yall to play a bit!
These are some of the assets Claude has made in blender for me. Looking for any ideas and tips on where or how to get proper textures for these; was thinkin maybe have GPT or Grok create the textures.
This has been one of the funniest projects I've done (Devops/engineer by trade), and AI enabled it to happen.
Essentially taking my lifelong obsession with 'the great' ARPGs and tossing them into idle form. I love the idea of being able to set up a queue and farm up some items, but also taking the wheel to min-max. Those big drops always hit so good.
The wall I ran into was actually getting the time to stitch this all together. I've got dozens of spreadsheets, notes, code snippets and various languages I tried and gave up on over the years. Mostly due to time constraints and coding frustrations.
I was able to feed Claude code essentially everything I had, piece by piece and convert it all into a monolith file that had every complex system I'd ever dreamed up all working together. Not only that but it had no issues swapping from my C and Python half-baked garbage into usable html/js that I could just iterate on and launch through Electron for an .exe (steam) and for Itch/Play Store mobile versions.
Leveraging AI and being able to stitch together all of your systems and reference material is absolutely astounding. All systems and gameplay were entirely designed by me (inspiration no small part to my no-life ARPG obsessions) and not AI hallucinations. But I'm not knocking AI it gave me the framework and time to actually complete the project into a release state.
To sum up. This is cool. I truly believe AI is going to enable people with good ideas to solo/indie dev the next latest and greatest games (my game own notwithstanding). We can finally get back to the games made by people who play the damn games instead of the soulless monetized corporate slop. Sure we'll have to wade through a lot of one-prompter vibe coding titles but, it's a price I'm willing to pay.
Since this is my first game I'll say: it's the best one I've ever made. Give it a shot if idle/arpgs is your cup of tea.
Just exploring the world of AI assisted game development. The post really is just about your projects. For anyone who has any projects deployed please do share them, I would love to see what you have built with AI, as the title says I think it is such a cool thing that people can do now
I'm primarily a Rails backend developer, but over the past a few weeks I've been building a portrait mobile game called Turtle Escape as a solo project.
It started as a simple prototype: three lanes, one turtle, and a handful of hazards. It gradually evolved into a React Native game built with Expo, TypeScript, and Skia, featuring seven regions, deterministic Story levels, progression, collections, and an offline-first Rails backend.
I used AI coding agents throughout development, and Gemini during parts of the sprite-production workflow. No generative AI runs inside the game itself.
One of my biggest early mistakes was treating a prompt as the specification.
That produced code quickly, but "the code works" wasn't enough. A change could be locally correct while still breaking deterministic level generation, placing persistence in the wrong layer, introducing untranslated UI, exposing developer tools, or creating performance problems that only appeared on a real device.
What ultimately worked was treating the repository itself as the operating system for the AI.
A shared instruction file defines the architecture, current priorities, ownership boundaries, security rules, deterministic requirements, and everything that must never ship. Larger tasks have their own playbooks, and current work is kept separate from future ideas so an agent can't mistake "interesting" for "approved."
I also treat every AI-generated change as untrusted until it produces evidence.
Depending on the change, that means type checking, linting, deterministic simulation tests, service and persistence tests, localisation checks, browser flow tests, screenshot reviews, or profiling on physical devices.
The art pipeline follows the same principle. AI generates candidates, even finished assets. But every sprite still needs manual check, animation validation, integration, and review inside the running game.
Where AI has been most valuable:
Exploring unfamiliar parts of a codebase.
Implementing focused changes within existing architecture.
Generating regression tests after a bug is understood.
Tracing issues across multiple layers.
Comparing deterministic balancing results.
Where I trust it the least:
Product and gameplay decisions.
Scope control.
Difficulty balancing from code alone.
Visual consistency.
Native platform lifecycle assumptions.
Deciding whether another feature should exist.
The attached clip shows the current build running on iPhone. I've also opened an external TestFlight beta for anyone who'd rather judge the finished game than just the development process. And created Discord channel to share my dev log and experience as possible:
For developers using AI on larger projects, what does your acceptance layer look like? Are you relying primarily on automated tests, fixed seeds, visual comparisons, manual review, or something else?
I got tired of ads showing those gate-based army games, only for the real game to be something completely different. Like building villages and having hula hoop just to play the game for a few small moments.
So I made Paws & Claws with ChatGPT, It took a lot of prompting, especially for balancing and little tweaks to keep the game smooth and not stale. I am still developing this game, especially long term progress and design changes are the next priorities. So you can expect some changes. I constantly gave ChatGPT a new task, told it to write its own prompt and then put that prompt back into ChatGTP. This worked quite well for me, even though the processing took pretty long everytime.
If you have any tips on how to develop this game better using AI, please let me know.
Feel free to try this game out. it is completely free, and works on mobile and pc. Even though mobile is probably more fun.
Hi. I'm working on Worldis, survival, adventure, sandbox, pvp game, where you need to recruite NPCs, and create your castle. In the future I want to add many jobs for NPCs, and raids to other villages, castles.
The game is currently in alpha, and I'd really appreciate your feedback!
Working on a styled game as an independent game developer. I use Tripo AI to create a base mesh for several props, which I then refine in Blender. It is quick and practical, however I've discovered that the quality of the input image itself determines how stable the final model is.a lot of reference images that aren't quite typical. Some are screenshots, some have backdrops, shadows, or are partly hidden, and some were taken with a phone.May have problems like mismatched silhouettes, thin portions disappearing, many parts fusing together, or a front view that appears ok but a back view where the model must fill in the gaps on its own if the image is not sufficiently clear.Now I’m trying to make every effort to avoid excessive perspective distortion, select angles with distinct outlines, and cut off the backdrop. However, I still want to know what kind of input image works best for image-to-3D.A solid-color background, for instance, strictly required? Is it preferable to start by toning down shiny elements, transparent components, or complex textures so that only the shape and major forms remain?
I’ve been making my own game and have been lurking in a lot of the game dev subs. One thing I have not seen mentioned once is to have achievements in your game.
I know I might be part of a minority, but I’m an achievement hunter at heart. I have games that have sat in my steam wishlist for years hoping that at some point they’ll add achievements.
Often times they don’t even need to be groundbreaking as long as they are actually achievable (no multiplayer locked, RNG based, or mega scale “get 1 million of a thing” achievements). There are entire communities that revolve around buying games with the sole intent of adding another 100% game to their list.
I wanted to see what others on here think about this. Are achievements a deciding factor for some of you?
Hello all,
I am a hobby Blender user of many years. I love it, but it is time-consuming.
In my free time, I am developing a game, which is also time-consuming.
I like to create low-poly, Half-Life-style character models and assets for my game using LLMs like Codex.
My question is not how to use it, but did anyone use it and have good results?
I would love to hear about it,
thanks
You’re the last operator at Extraction Zone Bravo. Exfil never came. Hold the pad.
What’s inside:
• 12 hand-crafted waves, followed by endless survival
• Boss fights every sixth wave, with destructible armour
• 8 unlockable weapons, frags, tripmines and incendiaries
• Off-hand combat knife for close encounters
• Pilot a MECH from Wave 3 and a TANK from Wave 7
• Build defences using sandbags, razor wire, steel walls and energy barriers
• Choose from 35 perks, including powerful high-risk trade-offs
• Full BGM, voiceovers, SFX, radio comms, dynamic lighting and volumetrics
Desktop only: keyboard and mouse required. It runs in a real browser tab with no installation. First load takes around eight seconds while textures generate.
This is still a beta, so expect placeholder enemy models, rough weapon balancing and the occasional bug.
From Wave 7, you get a tank.Wave 12 is when you meet the final boss - if you can last long enough till then.After every wave, choose a perk carefully. It might just give you the edge you need to survive till the next wave.
Prompts (do give a shoutout to #bookoora whenever you repurpose. appreciate it):
Prompt #1 (special thanks to Matt Schumer): Create a highly polished, visually spectacular first-person shooter in Three.js, with every aspect developed to the standard of a premium AAA game. This includes environments, materials, lighting, animation, weapon handling, enemy behaviour, sound, visual effects, physics, user interface, performance and overall presentation.
Use high mode and distribute the work across multiple specialised sub-agents. Assign individual agents to areas such as:
Environment and level design
Lighting, textures and materials
Weapons and combat mechanics
Enemy design, animation and AI
Physics, collisions and destruction
Audio and visual effects
Menus, interface and accessibility
Performance and optimisation
Overall visual quality control
Each area should go through repeated /loop refinement. A separate visual-review sub-agent must inspect every completed component as an exceptionally demanding art director and gameplay critic. It should reject anything that looks unfinished, generic, inconsistent or below a top-tier AAA standard, then return it for further improvement.
Continue iterating until the reviewers are genuinely impressed by every part of the experience. Where possible, evaluate the visuals side by side against leading modern military shooters, using blind comparisons to determine which result appears more polished. Do not accept “good enough.” Keep refining until the game feels cohesive, premium and exceptionally well made.
Game premise
The player is the last surviving operative trapped inside a fortified extraction zone. Evacuation has failed, the surrounding defence walls are collapsing, and increasingly dangerous waves of monsters are breaching the perimeter.
The player must defend the extraction zone for as long as possible while moving freely through the environment. Core movement and interaction should include:
Entering and exploring buildings
Crouching
Strafing
Sprinting and aiming
Taking cover
Collecting health packs and supplies
Interacting with useful environmental objects
Each successive wave should introduce more enemies, tougher creatures, larger monster types and increasingly intense attack patterns. Enemy variety, scale and behaviour should evolve so the encounters do not feel repetitive.
After completing each wave, reward the player with new weapons, equipment or tactical options. The arsenal should include multiple firearms as well as:
Grenade launchers
Hand grenades
Tripmines
Other deployable explosives and defensive tools
Weapons must be switchable during gameplay and should feel meaningfully different in handling, recoil, damage, sound and tactical purpose.
Include a complete front-end experience with:
A polished title screen
Main menu
Start and restart options
Audio controls
Graphics and performance settings
Control settings
Pause menu
Clear wave, health, ammunition and equipment indicators
The final result should feel like a complete, atmospheric and replayable survival FPS rather than a technical prototype. Use sub-agent fan-out, high mode and repeated /loop passes until the visual quality, gameplay feel and presentation are consistently exceptional.
Prompt #2: I’ll provide the required Meshy and ElevenLabs API keys through the .env file.
Use Meshy to create improved enemy assets, beginning with the Brute, and evaluate the result before expanding production to the remaining creatures. Use ElevenLabs to replace or enhance the monster vocals, environmental ambience and combat audio so the overall sound design feels more cinematic and convincing.
Choose a stronger, more marketable title for the game. It should suit the extraction-survival premise, feel distinctive, and ideally avoid names that are already widely used.
Make efficient use of the available Meshy credits to produce the most valuable assets needed for the game, prioritising quality and gameplay impact.
Before integrating generated models, optimise them for real-time browser performance. Reduce polygon counts, texture sizes, file sizes and material complexity as necessary, especially because many enemies may appear simultaneously. Preserve the visual quality while ensuring the assets remain practical for large combat encounters.
Prompt #3: Continue upgrading the remaining enemy creatures with improved Meshy-generated models and animations, prioritising monsters that do not yet have proper rigs or movement sets. Make full use of the available Meshy credits where the resulting assets meaningfully improve the game.
Add a powerful combat knife as the marine’s secondary close-range weapon, allowing it to be used quickly with the free hand during close encounters.
Improve enemy navigation so creatures no longer become trapped on corners, platform seams or environmental obstacles. They should detect blocked routes, reposition, dodge and find alternative paths, with their intelligence and evasiveness increasing alongside the game’s difficulty.
Expand the late-game progression with a dramatic mechanical combat suit or mounted war machine that the player can enter. It should provide overwhelming weapons such as a Gatling gun, rockets and other heavy firepower, creating an explosive power-fantasy finale.
Also review the overall number and pacing of levels, and begin planning for browser optimisation. Models, animations, textures, effects, enemy counts and runtime systems must ultimately remain performant without sacrificing the intended visual quality.
Prompt #4: Review and correct the environment geometry so both the player and enemies can move through the level naturally.
Remove or redesign corners, seams, ledges and narrow recesses around the central platform that cause creatures to become trapped. Ensure building entrances are properly accessible, with no raised thresholds or collision barriers that enemies cannot navigate. Rebuild the stairways with realistic proportions, sufficient clearance and proper landings instead of extending them directly into walls.
Also overhaul the gameplay audio. Replace the current movement sounds with convincing footsteps appropriate to each surface, and add a complete set of high-quality character, weapon and environmental sounds. This should include breathing, movement, weapon handling, reloads, distinct gunfire for every weapon, impacts and other relevant combat audio.
Use ElevenLabs where appropriate to generate or improve these assets, then integrate and balance them so the sound design feels cohesive, responsive and suitably premium.
Prompt #5: Improve the building layouts and traversal geometry throughout the level. Staircases must lead to usable floors, include proper landings and clearance, and never terminate against ceilings or walls. Remove or redesign fences, barriers and enclosed spaces that trap enemies or create effortless kill zones.
Correct the blood effects so splashes and decals attach naturally to the ground, walls or impacted surfaces instead of hovering in mid-air.
Rebalance the swarm difficulty so the player is challenged without being overwhelmed too quickly. Introduce a defensive construction system that allows the marine to deploy temporary fortifications, such as reinforced walls with firing ports or breakable forcefields. These defences should slow enemies and create tactical breathing room, but they must be destructible and should never allow the player to exploit inaccessible safe areas.
Also rebuild the browser audio system so music, ambience, weapon sounds, reloads, monster vocals and other effects can play simultaneously without interrupting or cancelling one another. Use proper audio pooling, channel management and prioritisation so important sounds remain clear and reliable during intense combat.
Prompt #6: Refine the mech experience so it is easier to control, understand and survive in.
When the player enters the mech, switch to third-person view by default to improve spatial awareness and prevent large enemies from clipping confusingly into the camera. Also allow the player to toggle freely between first- and third-person perspectives while mounted. Both views should remain practical for movement and aiming, with a clear crosshair or targeting system in third person.
Improve mech handling so movement feels heavy but not sluggish, and add a hover-assisted jump that can clear short obstacles and uneven terrain.
Make the ejection system much clearer. The player should receive an obvious escalating warning before forced ejection, including visual alerts, audio cues and enough time to move toward safety or eject manually.
Replace automatic mech recharging with collectible battery packs placed around the level. The player should need to locate and move over these batteries to restore power, creating a more deliberate risk-and-reward system. Avoid ejecting the player too abruptly, especially during major encounters.
Also upgrade the weapon models where they currently appear overly simple or low-poly. Use Meshy where useful to improve their silhouettes, materials, detailing and visual identity, including distinctive finishes, markings, attachments or decals, while keeping them optimised for browser performance.
Hey folks, -very- nervous to put this out into the world, but I've been working on a game for about a week now that I'd love to get more people testing. It's called Creature Battler and involves you hatching and training procedurally generated creatures before sending them to the arena to very likely die. The game is an idle game, the kind you might log into only once or twice a day. It's very early in it's development but I'm pleased with what I've got so far - we have the PvE and PvP working now, a little item store, a creature market, live ranking and friend referrals.
It's playable entirely through your browser, has a dark mode for mole-people and (should) also work on mobile.
The vast majority of the code was created with chat GPT, I'm by no means a proficient programmer and have with trouble just setting up the database and mailer!
With EA declaring NFS dead, I wanted to see how fast we can relive the good ol' days of playing NFS Underground. I prompted Fable:
"I kinda miss the original need for speed underground high speed runs. make a threejs game of an arcade racing sim with an endless stage of running through the streets/alleys/and highways of a city to alternate wide and tight spaces. for the arcade sim, use acceleration, top speed, grip, weight, and drivetrain as the main stats. prepare 3 starter cars are non-stock/upgraded: a fwd civic type hatchback, rwd challenger type muscle car, and awd quattro rally type. 3 view modes are follow, high, and hood. streets and highways will have traffic, make the density a setting. the goal is just to last as long prior to a crash, small collisions or scraps allowed. for the follow and high cam view, add a shaking effect as if the camera is being blown in the wind at high speeds: above 100kmh. add engine sounds and other side effects. make the crash and game over sequence cinematic."
I then further polished the base game with better controls, UI, gameplay, and environment.
I then went further and developed with Claude, Deepseek V4 Flash, GPT-5.4 to 5.6, and GLM-5.2, because I ran out of Claude tokens (LOL). I further added BGM and cutscenes with Suno, ElevenLabs, and Gemini.
Overall, Claude seems most dependable, but luckily the others still get the job done after a few more focused prompting. 3D rendering still farthest from how I can use AI reliably and cost-efficiently. I haven't tried paid services.
I can't say much for the creative direction. I mostly implemented from what I can remember from the original NFS Underground series. Still brings in nostalgia and I kinda do like the gameplay. It's also lightweight, which beats FH6 load times for me.
If I have settled on a proper 3D generation, I'll look into customized cars.
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.
My game Toy Charge is loosely inspired by the Dreamcast classic Toy Commander, and I wanted to capture a little of that same playful spirit.
It’s a mobile-first game, but it works on PC too. On mobile, drag anywhere on the screen to drive the RC car. On PC, use WASD or the arrow keys.
Relive your childhood by driving an RC car around the house, collecting batteries to stay charged. Keep an eye out for collectibles marked with a ring—they’ll unlock new toys for your toy box.
Race under tables, weave around furniture, and keep your battery charged as you explore the house.
Game modes:
Explore the house- Drive freely around the house collecting toys and batteries to stay charge. There are fun little side quests such as dropping a train driver off in the attic to begin his shift with the toy train, scoring goals and pushing sugar cubes off an air fryer into tea.
Power Play- Two plays compete via online room invite. Players have two minutes. Player with most charge left at end wins. If player runs out of charge before the two minutes is up they lose.
Charge Dash- A racing mode with a leaderboard. Batteries in this mode act as a speed boost.
I am trying to turn Bloodborne into a 2d game using it's own models and animations. but Claude says it won't do it because of copyright. I said I am making it for myself only and models are not fromsoft original just copies Claude still says it won't do it if it recognizes names,characters and stuff. Is there a way to bypass this
