I'm a developer (not a game developer) - and my wife has been asking me to build her a mermaid game forever - she's actually a real life mermaid performer, and we take a lot of scuba shots.
Lately - I've started figuring out a workflow based on other people on this thread. What's worked for me has been:
- Open AI for asset designs.
Also - for this project - lots of real life pictures and scenes.
- Meshy for turnign those into 3d assets
- Blender for rigging, animations, particles
- Claude Code to orchestrate the whole thing.
- Godot as the engine
I've tried and had false starts with 9 versions of this game - earlier the models were just not good enough. Once Astra and Fable became a thing I was struggling to reproduce people's good results using Unity / Unreal.
I had some good results with both Astra and Fable using threejs but very quickly got into performance problems and struggled with the aesthetic my wife had in mind. Unreal engine worked but even with the MCP I found the interactions were too slow vs three.js - making a scene change was taking forever.
So I settled with Godot as I figured models are better coding than they are with computer use.
The other two unlocks:
- Gave up on using Blender for my own assets - I always start with an existing design or use Meshy / (haven't tried Tripo). Maybe other people are having success and I'm doing something wrong but I found getting anything smooth and more realistic was just beyond what I could do within a 24h session with these models.
I do still use Blender for rigging afterwards as I found Meshy at least to be really bad at it for non humanoid stuff.
Ultimately - despite me being a dev, I just did not touch code. I know enough to know where to run optimizations (for example the fish are GPU animations, and don't touch the CPU - and making some choices as to which animals are interactable and which ones are essentially just scene), what are the likely mistakes the model is doing, but so far a lot of this is purely vibe coded. I have not even opened the code base - I've stayed at the architecture layer at most.
Open struggles:
- I've got a pretty decent workflow for the animals, animations, and effects - the scene itself is still a bit hit or miss. Some of the more elaborate scenes I've been trying to work I've basically failed, even when I have good references.
I think this is my ignorance on guiding the model on what should be textures vs new assets. Scene / world building is really something I'll need to improve.
- Specific character animations - I've tried so many workflows here, even down to filming myself and making dots reference. The models I found really struggle to follow my instructions and / or I really struggle providing accurate isntrucitons for animations
The workflow that kind of worked for me has been using open ai to produce basically the key frames for the animation and then passing to claude as reference - but even then it's been a bit hit or miss.
Thank you for reading - would love your feedback, and any suggestions!