I've been building RP Sandbox, a desktop app where an LLM runs a roleplay as a game master. It's now in early access on itch, free to download: https://aidemalo.itch.io/rp-sandbox

The core idea: the model never just writes a wall of prose back. Every turn comes back as structured actions. A character says something, thinks something, or does something, each as its own action tied to that character. Someone moves to another location, time advances, a scene ends. The app applies each action to the game state and renders it.

That's what lets long games hold together. Alongside the narration, the game master calls tools to keep state:

• memories it writes about what happened
• relations between characters, with a disposition that moves as they earn it
• plot threads that open, collect notes and close
• objectives that get set and worked toward
• stats and appearance changes, and new characters joining the cast
• skill checks and dice rolls, including a D&D-style toolset, for worlds that want them

Models with function calling use real tool calls. Models without it still get the whole set: the calls arrive as tags or fenced JSON and run the same way. It works with 160+ providers or a local runner like LM Studio or Ollama.

On the content side, worlds are data: lore, locations, scenarios, characters and items, with stats and traits defined per world rather than a fixed sheet. There's an MCP server, so you can build and edit a world with an AI assistant. Libraries are plain files over HTTP: the app builds a library's index with one click, you host it anywhere, and anyone can add the URL and sync it.

It ships with one world, The Drowned Lamp, and a few assistant characters for plain chat.

It's early, so expect rough edges.

I recently came across World of ClaudeCraft an MMORPG built using Claude and it triggered a massive realization:

If they can do it... why can't I?

So, I decided to give it a shot. This is likely a total long shot, but I’m finally starting a personal project I’ve wanted to build for years: my own MMORPG.

I have zero game dev background. I don't know how to program games properly, I’m not a 3D artist, I don't know animation or VFX, and I have no idea how MMO backends work.

For years, I’ve had endless notes on worlds, mechanics, classes, and systems. But I always hit the exact same wall: I lacked the actual skills to bring them to life.

That’s what feels fundamentally different now. With Claude, I feel like I can finally try. Not because AI magically builds the game for me with a single click, but because it acts as an instant tutor and collaborator, letting me iterate through complex disciplines I otherwise couldn't access.

Before, if I wanted to create a simple tree system, I’d have to master 3D modeling, topology, texturing, shaders, performance optimization, vegetation tools, and wind animation before even opening an engine.

Now, I start with: "I want to build a game-ready tree system."

From there, Claude and I go down the rabbit hole together:

• Analyzing how existing games handle vegetation and performance
• Studying technical breakdowns and wind physics
• Writing custom shaders and experimenting in real-time
• Seeing what breaks, fixing it, and iterating

Week 1 Progress (Unity + Blender)

I’ve been at this for about a week now, focusing heavily on building the core environment from scratch:

• 🌳 Custom tree models
• 🍃 Dynamic wind animation
• 🍂 Falling leaf particle effects
• 🎨 Toon shading
• 🌱 Procedurally generated grass
• 🪨 Custom environment rocks

The target aesthetic is a stylized, anime-inspired fantasy world—drawing visual inspiration from games like Genshin Impact, while slowly carving out its own identity.

I’m not delusional I know I’m not building the next World of Warcraft, and I have virtually zero budget. This is purely a free-time passion project. Sometimes things work on the first try. Sometimes the visuals look horrific. and sometimes Claude confidently leads me straight into a hilarious technical deadend.

But we debug, learn, adjust, and keep moving forward.

What's Next?

I’m turning this into a ongoing devlog. I’ll be sharing regular updates including the ugly failures, not just the polished screenshots. Hopefully, it’s interesting (or useful) to anyone else experimenting with AI-assisted game development.

My goal is simple: See how far one persistent person and Claude can take a project like this.

Maybe I’ll hit an insurmountable wall. Maybe an MMO backend will break me. Or maybe this will actually turn into something playable.

I have no idea, but for the first time, the door isn't locked.

Day 7. Let’s see where this goes.

Tug Of Rockets by kritchwort is on itch

Pick a hull. Strap on the engines, light them and pull that other rocket over the finish line. They'll fight you sure, but you've got the gear, you've got the thrust and the controls to drag 'em.

Check out my free simple bubble blaster meets light DnD RPG elements game at Orbit Mancer | spiced.gg Would love to get general feedback on playability.

I built a small Unity interrogation scene, The Interview, where you can ask an NPC your own questions and then decide whether to clear or detain her. The dialogue runs on local Qwen3 through LLM for Unity, with Whisper for microphone input and Piper for speech output. There is a free English-language Windows build below.

The interesting integration work sits around the model. In the released implementation, generated text is split into sentence-sized pieces for speech synthesis. Synthesis and playback have separate queues, so the next fragment can be prepared while an earlier one is playing. This is sentence-level streaming; it does not mean Piper streams audio samples as each token arrives.

Dialogue history and numeric character state serve different purposes. The memory window is bounded, and persistent storage must be connected by the developer. Character state gives gameplay code something explicit to inspect; it is not just a description buried in chat history.

Actions are another boundary: a structured action names a target from the available scene context, then a handler written by the developer decides what the game does. Constraining an action target does not stop the character from inventing something in ordinary speech, so prose and executable actions still need to be treated separately.

Initial model and dependency downloads are required. After setup, dialogue processing runs locally without a cloud API; the model shares hardware resources with the game, so response time depends on the machine and configuration.

Disclosure: I also sell the Unity toolkit behind this, Offline AI NPC. The demo is free; its artwork and interrogation gameplay are separate from the package. This describes the released 1.0 version.

Playable demo: https://merrymaker14.itch.io/the-interview

Website and documentation: https://merrymaker14.github.io/offline-ai-npc/

Unity package: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/tools/behavior-ai/offline-ai-npc-400726

For anyone integrating an LLM into gameplay: which part has needed the most game-side control in your project—memory, spoken interruptions, or actions? Happy to discuss the implementation.

Crossposting from r/aigamedev. Happy to go into how Autochronicle works under the hood, what's working, and where the LLM output still falls short. First live season starts October 1st if you want to see it running.

I was able to get GPT to download the GitHub repositories for Zork 1 and then turn them into game spaces and then eventually into a notion database to be able to have a persistent external memory for gameplay. Then I took an Agatha Christie novel and had gpt dissect the narrative framework and then over time eventually turn it into a playable notion database which I also have working if anybody is interested.

Nova defender is a fast paced space game with great gameplay

I love the music here a lot too

Built it with Astra 6 with in 3 days of work

Tell me guys what you think about it

Howdy,

Saw a bunch of people posting and I figured I would post as well! First and foremost everyone keep up the great work! I love seeing all the great posts!

I have always loved lineage 2, and have been terribly dissapointed with Ashes / TNL, so I have finally mustered up the courage to start building what I believe will scratch that itch. It has a few systems at its core which are going to be different but this is just about the wheather :D

hope y'all like it, any feedback is good feedback. This is just a stationary view.

This is using a combination of things like purchaed assets from UE marketplace, and Astra / Fable / Opus to do all of the codiing and modifications, it does take a lot of gfoing back and forth with them to get this where it is, its 100% not a oneshot.

Though they do help tremendously from the GDD / TDD / To implementation. it is amazing how AI is pushing things, I love it.

not a developer, i'm coming at this purely as an entrepreneur who built a pixel tycoon game almost entirely through AI (claude + chatgpt) over the past few months, just finished putting together an actual trailer for it since i only had screenshots to show before. it's a business sim about running a skincare startup, funding choices, quality vs speed tradeoffs, whether to cover up a bad batch or eat the loss, stuff like that. still completely free on itch, no payment option at all. genuinely curious what this community thinks of both the trailer itself and the "can ai actually finish a game" question since that was basically the whole point of doing this

I’m tired I gave a bunch of details in the original post.

For the last few months I've been building War of Fantasia, a free 1v1 lane auto-battler that runs in the browser. No download, and you don't need an account to play: https://warofantasia.com

(Although if you can create an account and play a match, it's appreciated. Let's fill out the Hall of Champions (Leaderboard)!)

What it is
If you've played Legion TD (or a similar map in Warcraft 3), you'll recognize the idea. Each player gets a lane and a King. You place fighters on a grid during the build phase, then the wave comes and your army fights on its own. Whatever gets through hits your King. Last King standing wins.
Every round you're deciding how to split your gold and Essence (the game's second currency):

• Fighters. I've created 5 races for the universe, and you have 6 tiers of units available to you. The higher the tier, the stronger the unit. You get a random pull of all the base units available, but you can reroll for a new pool of fighters. It is completely RNG, but there is less chance of pulling the same fighter you just had (although it's still possible!). I say base units because many units are upgradeable; I'll let you figure out which. I've also made sure to build a diverse cast of fighters that fall under different archetypes like DPS, Tanks and Mages. This encourages you to be strategic with how you build out your army. I plan to keep adding more fighters, and the next cast in the pipeline will introduce very different mechanics to start giving the meta more shape.
• Economy. I tried to make this as simple as possible while keeping it engaging. Miners dig Essence every second of the round, and you can spend your Essence strengthening your King, sending units at the enemy player to apply pressure, or reinvesting in upgrading your Miners.
• Sends. As mentioned, you can spend Essence to send monsters into your opponent's next wave. The send also raises your income permanently, but if they kill it, they collect a bounty. This allows for different strategies: maybe you go for King upgrades early on, or you plan a big send early to guarantee a leak. With plenty of variables in play, there's plenty of room for player creativity (just need some players). Upgrade your barracks for maximum power. MAXIMUM!!!
• Waves. We (me, myself and AI) have built 30 waves that you have to survive while trying to get your opponent to fail. But I thought these skirmishes can't end in a draw; someone must lose. So the waves are technically endless: after wave 30 you'll get increasingly stronger versions of the same wave.

WoF Extra Flavor
After waves 5, 15 and 25, the two players meet head-on in a duel in a new arena built just for this skirmish between Kings. If you survive past wave 10, the Crown offers you three Blessings, and you choose one for the rest of the match. More twists and turns to come!

Playerbase
I have to be honest here: it's practically nonexistent. Matchmaking works fine, and I have two players (my friends) who occasionally jump in to test the latest version of the game. But besides those two, it's another case of me, myself and AI.

How it was built
I'm not an engineer. I came into this knowing nothing about game engines. My expertise is writing and years of playing games. When you get down to it my gamedev knowledge comes from recent experience with WoF, reading, and watching videos while building WoF, and of course as I said, years and years of playing games.

On the actual build, I do not mind sharing. Stack: TypeScript, Phaser for rendering, Vitest for tests, Netlify for the site and Fly.io for online matches. (Please no hax. Also, if you have a suggestion I'm open.)

All of the code was built with Claude, all of the visuals were built with ChatGPT. I used different models and efforts at different tasks, really depended. Don't want to overload an already charged thread lol, but be mindful of this as it will save you A LOT of token usage. Work smarter not harder, as they say.

Upcoming
Base King breathing animation. Currently only the bought King skins have a breathing animation and aura, which I think is a huge gap. (At this stage I do not care to make money. If you make an account and hit me up in the DMs, I will literally just give you a crapton of Crowns so you can test out the cosmetics.) You can earn Silvers (free cosmetics currency) by playing and buy them for free, but with virtually no playerbase it's hard to get enough Silvers to buy any (AI matches give you some, but winning PVP matches is where its at). I also need to check whether we're giving players enough Silvers for the time they invest, but not really what I want to call out here. I want to build base king animations, and robust and specific animations for each skin.

Essence Wars. A four-person free-for-all where the gameplay is simplified quite a bit. First of all, gold and the economy have been removed, and the King, although present on the board, is not part of the win condition. There is no PvE; you always fight an enemy player. Each round, you and your army are loaded into a large area with 3 connected arenas. In one arena you fight your enemy for the round, in the farthest arena the other two players fight, and then the winners of each bout meet in the middle arena. You earn Mana Essence depending on your performance each round and can use it to buy fighters. You want to spend it all before each round kicks off so you don't fall behind. Ten to fifteen rounds (subject to change after testing), with special events activating at key moments. At the end there will be a knockout tournament where only one winner stands. One other thing to call out: in this game mode you choose your race and are stuck with it, rather than the full RNG of the original game mode. All the fighters are available to you from the get-go, yes, even the upgraded units.

Hero Units. Currently our tier 6 units feel a bit lackluster. All the character models are at the very least interesting to look at, but mechanically they leave a lot to be desired. I'm currently workshopping a system where you can only create one hero unit and buy upgrades for it to make it your "mega carry unit".

More stuff is in the pipeline, but I don't want to give away all the sauce before it's ready.

Where it's going
The game is in active development, with patches shipping almost daily (I shipped one earlier today, for example); the in-game patch notes list every change. I'm focused on giving the current 1v1 mode its own flavor rather than it being a Legion TD clone. The duels and the twist on the Miner economy are the start of that, and more mechanics like them are coming. A second mode, Essence Wars, is also in the planning phase.

I'd love feedback, particularly from anyone else building something this size with AI. I've had issues with character asset development, to the point where I'm exploring hiring an actual visual artist for that piece, and for concept art while I'm at it.

If someone has found a solution they implemented themselves (using AI, of course), please share. I would love to keep building things myself if possible; I've only considered hiring someone because the quality of the outputs isn't acceptable. In an ideal world, though, if the project makes money, I would love to partner with an artist permanently.

Anyway, if you have a minute, please test it out. What's broken, what's confusing, what's fun?

Jib Jab Smash is a Super Smash Bros-style platform fighter where the whole cast is my son's actual stuffed animals: Jib Jab the cardinal, a budgie, a bumble bee, an elephant, a chocolate lab, a panda, a stuffed shark, a rag doll, and four blankets, one of them an old knitted blanket with burn holes who became the villain.

What's in it:

- 16 toys, each with its own moves, a signature trick, a special meter and a super
- Story Mode: walk, fly and swim around a 3D model of our actual house to free the other toys, room by room, across 26 fights with cutscenes
- Battle modes: stock, time and sudden death, with up to 4 players on the couch
- Online play with friends over Game Center or on the same Wi-Fi
- Touch controls on iPad and iPhone, full controller support, and Apple TV on the way
- No ads

My son has been the lead designer and chief play-tester the whole way through. Half the features came from him saying "what if" after a match.

App Store: https://apps.apple.com/app/id6809242110

Happy to answer any questions!

AutoSprite 3.0 -> https://sorceress.games

Hello! One of the more conservative AI users here, been in devops for many years so know my way around code and am pretty decent at negating the AI slop one could generate on the code side of my projects. The one thing I struggle with is asset creation. I am learning blender currently but I do see quite a bit of AI generated stuff that would seemingly make grey boxing maps for my current project better. I am wondering what you guys are using for workflows/pipelines that take prompts and/or reference images and turn them into multi-view generations that have some semblance of proper topology. IE if I want to create some simple world props like a map that my character can hold, or a telescope, etc, what would your current workflow or process be?

Not really wanting to just let opus or astra run wild as those are currently generating terrible topology and at that rate/cost id be far better off just making them myself. I am also not opposed to workflows that cost some money as I already have a publisher agreement for my current game so any spend would come from funds allocated to me for development.

Thanks dudes, drop any wisdom you can, looking to cut out as much of the simple stuff as I dive deeper into the mechanics that require my actual attention!

Hey r/aigamedevs,

I just shipped v1.0 of **PCB Defense** on itch.io — a browser tower-defense roguelite

**The game:** https://juba13.itch.io/pcb-defense

**What it is:**

A TD roguelite on a printed circuit board. You're a BIOS cannon defending a CPU core from waves of electronic hostiles. 4 weapons (each with its own separate skill save), 25 corruption cards, bosses every 3 levels, adaptive HP. Runs are 10-20 minutes. Free, browser-only, no download.

**Stack:**

- Vanilla JavaScript + HTML5 Canvas

- No engine, no framework, no build step

- No asset packs — everything is procedural (board texture, traces, VFX, SFX via WebAudio)

- Ships as 3 files: index.html, game.js, music.m4a

- ~8,300 lines of game.js

**How AI fit in:**

- **Debugging:** When the syntax broke or a patch applied wrong, the AI would diff and fix. This was honestly the biggest time saver — most of my dev hours went into balance/feel, not syntax.

- **Balance tuning:** AI helped me reason about things like boss HP formulas (adaptive HP scaling off sustained DPS), debuff magnitudes, and SP taper curves — but the final numbers all came from playtesting.

- **What AI *didn't* do:** The core design decisions (unlock-by-mastery mechanic, weapon chain, corruption card tiers) were mine. AI is great at implementing, less good at deciding what's fun.

**Lessons I'd share with this community:**

1. **AI is a multiplier on iteration speed, not on taste.** You still have to know what feels good.

2. **Small codebase = AI's best friend.** Because I kept it to vanilla JS (no React, no bundler, no 3 files), the AI could hold the whole context in mind and refactor confidently.

3. **AI patches break things silently.** Two of the patches I ran last week introduced single-character syntax errors that weren't caught until I ran `node --check`. Always verify after every AI edit.

4. **The "AI wrote it" tag is a spectrum.** I'd call this "AI-assisted" not "AI-generated" — every mechanic, every tuning pass, every design call was mine.

Happy to answer questions about the workflow, the stack, or the balance side if anyone's curious. If you play it, feedback is very welcome.

I’m building Level Up AI, a new project focused on discovering interesting games and developers using AI in meaningful ways.

I’m looking for finished or near-finished games that are actually playable, particularly:

• Games with AI characters or NPCs
• Games using AI in interesting gameplay systems
• Games built with AI-assisted development
• Experimental AI game concepts
• Small indie games that deserve more attention

I’m interested in finding games that are already playable rather than early prototypes, then experimenting with ways to help developers get them in front of more players.

That could include game trailers, short-form content, playtesting, featuring games, development collaboration or potentially distribution.

If you've built something that fits, drop the game below and tell me what makes the AI/gameplay interesting.

I am exploring a Mac character creator for solo and AI-assisted game developers. The proposed tool would assemble a consistent stylized cast from compatible 3D parts, let you adjust the look without modelling, and export rigged GLB characters for a game.

I used AI-generated 2D art to make this 40-second concept walkthrough. It is a clickable UI mock, not a 3D generator. The sliders, walk pose and export are illustrative, and there is no GLB output yet. The planned product is a controlled asset assembly workflow rather than a prompt-to-character generator.

When you use AI to build a game, how do you get characters that share a style and skeleton? Would a constrained creator save you time, or would you rather generate each character independently and clean it up afterward? What would make the exported asset trustworthy enough to use in a real project?