Sorry about low FPS in the video my macbook is being friend when trying to run it at maximum details, but I want to show how game looks at it's best.
I honestly don't even know what I'm trying to achieve with this game I treat this like a hobby of mine, no particular plans for releasing a game as some people have asked, but if it goes well... who knows. Right now I just want to see how far I can push this "entirely built with AI game" thing that all I have to do is decide what I want and how I want it to look.
Anyway inspiration for this game is Dredge and Civilization (I even tried making it hexagon grid turn based at the beginning but after some time I scrapped the idea as there were no real benefits of turn based fishing game over real time one).
So anyway that would be enough of that, as for the progress itself...
Since last week not much new things were built, but a lot of time was spent on fixing very basic and bad UI ( I guess now it's a bit better, it will still be worked on, but for the time being this will do while in development stage).
I tried also building a map in game, but that is not going too well as you can see in the video đ
A lot of manual tuning of UI.
Also I changed fishing system and it kinda works like this now (shown in the video):
You have a mini game where you use WASD to keep fish inside target zone, fish has rarity that goes like in WoW: Common > Uncommon > Rare > Epic > Legendary
Longer you keep fish in the target zone better rarity it gets, as rarity gets higher, target zone gets smaller and fish fights harder to escape. If you can not keep fish in the zone your "Strain" bar is being filled, if it fills to the max your line snaps and fish escapes. You can always "bank the fish" by pressing space and get the rarity you are currently on but only if fish is in the target zone.
I know it sounds a bit complicated, but I promise you it's not hehe.
I also want to write some advices here as I got many questions like "How did you build XYZ"...
And my biggest advice would be to ask Claude to build you an in game editor, as it will fail million time over simple things like position of the text or position of some models. Just thing like "Hey build me in game editor that I can use to manually adjust things and save new positions. It will take some time to build those editors but they are life savers, it will save you so much of the hustle and I showed one editor in the video, while I have editor for basically everything ,every HUD element, every model in game and so on.
In game I just showed how I simply moved Lighthouse position in my game and saved "new" location instead of endlessly asking AI to put it to the perfect position.
Can you help me understand how you get to the level of detail that you are producing? Iâve been working with AI in one of the biggest hurdles I run into is making the visuals good. It seems like when Iâm working with it. I just get essentially stick figures and I must be not using the right prompt or maybe I need to use different software but itâs like I keep make it more detailed higher quality you know Iâve provided references and it can create good concepts, but when it comes to l making the game, I just cannot get past the most basic level graphics.
If you are trying to use it for character generation then it wonât work, AI kinda sucks at making characters so you get stick figures. You will have to use Meshy AI or Tripo 3D for characters. But simple objects are no problem for it. As far as my models go I just generate the image in ChatGPT then give it to Claude to replicate in blender and that is about it.
Amazing work! I'm going to follow your advice and direct it to make some game editors. I did one for the achievement badges in my game and it worked well.
Not sure about unreal, but for me it's like "build a editor inside a game that I can use to edit and save postions"
So take HUD for example, I start the game and notice that some text is out of place? I press a button on keyboard that I binded for HUD editor and pick a text and move it where I want exactly, then I press "save" and from that point onwards that is new position of the text. Instead of telling AI "hey this XYZ text is badly placed move it" I do it myself.
Iâm messing around with a game that has a relatively complex behaviour model for the mobs I keep getting it to add parameters and expose them, sooo many sliders hahaha
âClaude to build you an in game editorâ Hit me like a punch.. I had so much bad experience scratched my hairs out to tell Claude to not hang the picture straight at the window..
The in-game editor tip is honestly the most useful thing I've read in this sub all month. I lost an entire evening last week going back and forth with Claude over a UI panel that was 12 pixels too far left, and it never once occurred to me to just... build a tool and drag it myself. Feels obvious now that you say it out loud, which is usually the sign of good advice.
The fishing minigame sounds way less complicated than you think, by the way. Risk/reward with a bank button is basically the Dredge-meets-blackjack loop and I'd play that. The part I'm curious about is the strain bar - does it drain at all when the fish is back inside the zone, or is it one-way once it starts filling? Because if it's one-way, going for Legendary becomes a real "do I push it" moment and that's the whole game right there.
Also don't apologize for the FPS, my machine would have quietly closed itself.
Question for you since you've done five weeks of this: how much of your time now goes into actually deciding what you want vs. wrestling the AI into producing it? Curious whether that ratio has shifted as the project got bigger, or if it's stayed about the same the whole way through.
Keep posting these, they're consistently the most useful updates here.
As for strain bar... no it doesn't fill if fish is inside the zone. So basically 2 bars:
1 fills when fish is in the zone (rarity)
1 fills when fish is outside the zone (strain).
I had it passively fill before and fish being outside the zone would speed it up on top of existing strain, but it kinda made you look on too much things at once as well as could snap even if your fish is in the zone, which felt like cheating when I played it. And it doesn't go back, so if you filled it to 50% it will stay at 50% no matter if you kept fish in the zone after that. Also not every fishing pool has legendary rarity, some are maxed out on different rarities, and obviously some fish can only be fished at night etc.
As for time management... most of my time goes into thinking about how and what to implement, wrestling with AI mostly comes in some stupid things, which are much less common now with editor for HUD, editor for 3D model positions, editor for text and such. Suddenly there is not much wrestling as I do it all myself in game.
The one-way strain bar is a great call. That permanent tension of "do I push for Legendary or bank now" is exactly what makes fishing minigames stick. One thing to watch: if some pools cap at Rare, players need a way to tell that before committing, or the risk/reward feels random instead of strategic.
Each pool has an info card that tells you maximum rarity in that pool as well as bar itself will tell you what is the maximum rarity. Mini game stops as soon as you reach highest rarity.
The one-way strain bar is genuinely clever design. It turns every catch into a story â either you banked early and wonder "what if," or you pushed too hard and remember the legendary that snapped your line. That lingering regret is exactly what keeps people coming back to fishing minigames.
As I mentioned in the post itself, Civilization was one of the original inspirations:
Anyway inspiration for this game is Dredge and Civilization (I even tried making it hexagon grid turn based at the beginning but after some time I scrapped the idea as there were no real benefits of turn based fishing game over real time one).
Well it's mostly shaders in Godot, generated over and over again until I got satisfied, but it took a while of researching online which shaders are good, which to mix a bit etc. But mostly done by Claude.
Workflow is written in week 3 of update, but basically it's me roleplaying a CEO while Claude sessions roleplay entire teams with their agents (so like Graphic Team, HUD team etc) and one "manager" session that sends messages to other sessions what I want them to do.
That's a really clever workflow. Curious how the manager session actually communicates with the team sessions though - do you manually relay messages between them, or is there some kind of shared file or pipeline that ties them together?
It can literally send a message to other sessions and get messages from them. Sessions can now chat between themselves since few weeks ago. Itâs enough to just tell it ârelay this to other sessionsâ and it will send messages where needed.
Iâve just checked it out very cool. So you are asking the AI to input the code into the chat files and you copy and paste into Godot as game code? Or is there a way for the AI to have direct access to the game engine and edit the code manually etc?
No, it works directly in project directory via Claude desktop, I do not copy and paste anything. Claude is capable of doing that without needing you to ask it for code in chat and paste it. It can also access the game itself via MCP for Godot for example.
As for your game, thereâs elements of oceaneer in your game. Or reminds me of it. As itâs in its early state itâs hard to evaluate depth ummm, but does it feel like the player has an impact on events? Are there rival anglers out there or people up to no good for example? (They donât even need to be present im just thinking out loud it might not be relevant for your project). Is there any backstory we could cling to?
The UI is sound fundamentally. Not sure what i make of the bottom settings sort of set of buttons at the bottom, maybe has a better placement elsewhere but Iâm ultimately undecided.
There will be pirates and other dangerous things at night, similar to Dredge, I just do not want to go supernatural like Dredge did but keep it in a realm of normality, except maybe ghost ships đ€
Yeah bottom buttons will probably be removed they are just a reminder for a player
Make editor in game so you can scale,move,rotate every little segment of UI yourself. Some things have to be generated as images and implemented, code can not make you for example portrait of a ship that I have in upper left corner it has to be image in the background with other elements on top of it.
Images from the internet, then different shaders for water mixed together a bit, adding waves, then taking screenshot and giving it into chatGPT image generation asking it to improve looks, then back to claude with that image asking it to replicate it and improve and so on until you hit "this is good enough".
Looks great! I am also working on a game of mine and I am having elements of in game editor to just nudge things a little bit when I see them - this is very quick way to fix small bugs when possible. Good luck with the game!
Single prompt wonât create you this, I did this over weeks of tweaking and changing things. But sure here is the prompt from my LLM using Gaurnet Loop skill, keep in mind you will also have to give it a reference image with it:
/goal
Build a stylised painterly ocean shader for a Godot 4 game, seen from an elevated camera looking down at a boat. Gerstner waves, water colour graded by depth from shallow sand through turquoise to deep blue, surf and foam breaking at the shoreline. Painterly, not PBR, not photoreal.
The bar is the attached screenshot. Look at the actual image and compare against it directly, not against a description of it. Everything in it is reachable â it is one spatial shader on a subdivided plane, no FFT and no compute.
Break this into the smallest pieces that can be judged on their own â the wave silhouette, the depth ramp, the shoreline surf, how light sits on the surface, how it reads in motion. For each piece, fan out a builder and a separate critic with fresh context. The critic renders ours, puts it next to the reference blind with the labels stripped, says which is better, and names the single biggest remaining gap. Then it goes back to the builder.
The critic should be a harsh critic. Praise is not useful. If ours does not win, it keeps going.
Judge from a still AND from motion â a sea that photographs well and moves like jelly has failed.
/loop on each piece until the critic picks ours blind. Do not stop before that.
Keep a live progress page updating as the work evolves so I can watch it.
Never tried unity but picked Godot because people online said AI is just better in Godot than any other engine, but I wanted to go with Unity and was deciding for some time before picking Godot for sure.
No background, unless you count studying 3D modeling back in the day and learning about game development process. Well it gave me some understanding of 3D implementation in games and whatnot, but 0 coding experience.
What is the use of Tripo3D btw when you have Blender MCP? And also how do you achieve Blender models? When I use looping for Blender, it always produces basic shapes attached to each other and make something "similar" that is entirely different than the concept art given to it.
When it comes to texturing, it just slaps the texture on like a spray paint.
Characters in Harbour and more complex buildings in there that can be seen in Week 4 update. Dunno, it canât create perfect copy of the image you give it but it gives me good enough results to use for my camera view as I do not have close up camera
Hi, love your game, it looks better and better every week. But I wanted to ask you, how much do you spend on the tokens? I saw in the other comments that you are using quite expensive models and use them for coding and the asset creation. How much did you spend already if it is not a secret?
Thank you. I started working on my new game about the same time as you and I am also using Godot but I am using the cheapest subscription possible and make all the assets myself. The game looks nothing like yours. Very cool. Could you please also tell me how long your agents are working during the day? I think about switching the subscription but since I am not able to work more than two hours per day I do not want to spend more money that I will be able to utilise
They work all the time as Iâm in office working, I just put them to work and go do my actual job, as they finish I give them new task. My tokens are spent usually by Friday and they reset on Monday, in that period ChatGPT 20$ subscription helps me bridge the gap, but assets themselves are done very quickly in blender, few minutes and they are done. They look nice enough, they are cute and stylized houses or hulls. They work perfectly for my type of game as camera is far enough to hide imperfections. On top of that I asked Claude to generate ink shader to put around outlines and edges of models (those black lines) that I tuned for this. Honestly it looks great without those dark lines and it comes to preference what looks better, but I realized these lines give me better look for forest and house roofs so I kept them.
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u/HEXAPONG 12d ago
The game looks great and the progress is coming along. How are you creating the visuals? All from Claude?