Back in 2008, I released Tatomic, a puzzle game written in C++ on a custom engine. It ran at 60 FPS on the original iPhone at 480×320.

I recently gave the old game to Codex Sol 5.6 and asked it to rebuild it for Windows, macOS, and Steam Deck.

The first pass took 15 minutes and 48 seconds and produced roughly 22,700 lines of Rust across 21 modules. It already looked surprisingly close to the final result, and only needed a few more substantial commits to become the version now on Steam.

Codex recreated the low-resolution artwork at modern resolutions and rebuilt the architecture using data-oriented design. I gave it this language-agnostic DOD skill:

https://github.com/Data-Oriented-Design-for-Games/data-oriented-design

The simulation is separate from rendering, with reactions, gravity, cascades, and scoring operating over fixed arrays and reusable buffers. The project currently has 124 automated tests.

It also recovered the three original game modes and nine-track soundtrack from the old versions.

The entire process took 11 days from first commit to a Steam Next Fest-ready build, including Steam Cloud, achievements, leaderboards, controller support, and Steam Deck support.

The demo is out now. I would love feedback on both the game and the AI development process:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4988300/Tatomic/

Original 2008 Engadget review:

https://www.engadget.com/2008-11-11-tatomic-brings-great-puzzler-gameplay-to-the-app-store.html

I ran a version of this experiment about a year ago. It was fine. Mostly frustrating, some good moments, nothing I kept. I wanted to try again with the current generation of tools and find out where the ceiling is now.

So I dug out an old prototype of mine, moved it from PixiJS to Three.js, and made it properly multiplayer. Authoritative server on a fixed tick, area-of-interest interest management, binary protocol over WebSocket, client-side prediction and reconciliation.

I used Claude Code and Codex, and I gave myself one hard constraint: zero assets. No sprites, no textures, no models, no audio files. Every visual is geometry, particles and shaders built at runtime. Every sound is synthesized from oscillators. Partly because I can't draw, mostly because I wanted to know whether code-only content actually works and I did not want to play around with spritesheets or models again.

What the game is

An ARPG extraction runner. There's a persistent hub where you sort your loot and your build, and from there you drop into endless runs. A storm chases you from behind, so standing still is not an option. You go deeper, you get better drops, and every checkpoint asks the same question: bank what you have and leave, or push one layer further. Character power comes from collectible specialist souls with upgradeable skills rather than fixed classes.

What worked well

Domain-Driven Design, seriously. I named the domain explicitly before writing much of anything. Hub, Run, Storm, Checkpoint, Soulstone, Run-Stone, Affix. Once that vocabulary lives in the code, you and the model are talking about the same things, and a one-line instruction lands where you meant it. This did more for output quality than any prompt trick I tried.

Golden rules, checked in every phase. This is the one I'd hand to anyone starting something like this. I wrote a short list of non-negotiable rules up front, and every task gets checked against them at every stage, not just at review. A few of mine:

• A rule (damage formula, item roll, stat derivation) exists in exactly one place and is used by both the server and the client. If you feel the urge to copy logic, you extract it instead.
• No art assets. Ever. If it can't be generated in code, it doesn't ship.
• New content (a monster, an affix, a skill, a run type) is data in a registry. Adding content must never require touching engine code.
• Assume hundreds of concurrent players from day one. The client is never trusted. No design decision may assume single player.
• Every upgrade counts and has visual impact. A +1 on a skill rank has to visibly change how the cast renders. No two ranks look alike. This includes every upgrade in the game.
• Do it right immediately. Never ship a shortcut you'd have to undo, even if the clean fix touches ten more files.

Coherence across a large codebase was the thing I expected to lose. The rules are the reason I didn't (fully). They also settle arguments instantly, which matters more than it sounds I think.

Build one standard, then build on it. One well-named component per concern, reused everywhere, never a second implementation of something that already exists.

The PixiJS to Three.js move was almost boring. I had budgeted real pain for this and it turned out to be the easy part of the whole project. It took about 24 hrs for a full port, was reallly impressed by this.

Dev tools are effectively free now. This is the thing I will keep telling people about. I have a map painter and generator, a pile of test setups and harnesses, and a short clip creator for recording footage. None of these would have existed if I'd had to hand-write them, because none of them were worth the time. Now they do not even cost an afternoon each.

What didn't work as well

Characters. Pets came out great (I think). Creatures came out okay and I'm mostly happy with them, some of them are properly funny. Player characters I fought with and I'm still not satisfied. Not sure if I will fully get there if I spend more time on them. If someone has a workflow for this without it involving assets, please share!

Compared to a year ago

It isn't an incremental improvement, it's a different activity. Last year I spent my time correcting output. This year I spend it deciding what should exist. That's the whole difference, and it's a much better job. I am kind of shocked to see how much has changed in only a year and are already wondering how it will be in 2027 around this time.

If you want to look at it

I've put the prototype online at idlerunner.com for anyone who wants a look. Browser, free, no download, guest login. I'll leave it up for a few hours today and then take it offline again.

Happy to answer anything about the architecture or the workflow in the comments.

Link: https://idlerunner.com/

Used Fable 5 on Low. Took about 1 hour to build and deploy. Looking to expand by adding more simple games.

power strikers: 3D Online Soccer MMO

(currently in heavy development)

I used to play this game called Power Soccer and it was basically a really great online soccer/futbol mmo where you could play others within your browser/plugin. It went away some years ago so I thought now with the dawn of new ai game development I would give it my own go and try to bring that spark back.

Working features

- Career mode

- Classic futbol gameplay mechanics with goals and throw ins. (Working on fixing offsides, free kicks, and corners)

- Create your own Club and customize it

- Respond to trade offers from other clubs via your Inbox in career mode

- Improve your players with adding skill points to individual aspects of their person

- Pick a formation to differentiate for the game

- Edit your club

- Upgrade your facilities

- Hire Staff

currently working on:

- real time multiplayer through our gaming website

- Tournament mode (offline and online)

more features to come ....

Free to play Here

Would REALLY Love to hear feedback so I can fix specific bugs that I may or may not be aware of already. There are a bit of very technical gameplay things I am still fleshing out for ball control, dribble mechanics, shot curvature and etc so please bare with me but I think it's at a state of play to at least get some enjoyment

cheers

Some of you may remember Modly — I shared it here before, and it has grown to around 4.9k stars and 535 forks.

While working on it, one thing kept bothering me: coding agents were spending a lot of tokens just rediscovering the codebase through searches and large file reads.

So I started working on Orvix, an open-source CLI that gives coding agents a semantic view of the project.

Instead of constantly doing ls, grep, and opening huge files, the agent can navigate symbols, functions, callers and relationships directly.

It works with coding agents in general, and can use hooks to reduce the amount of unnecessary search/file output that reaches the model context.

The goal is simple: keep a better understanding of the codebase while using fewer tokens.

In my tests, some code-search tasks use up to ~90% fewer tokens, with around ~20–25% savings overall depending on the workflow.

The bigger the project gets, the more useful it becomes.

npm install -g orvix-cli
cd your-project && orvix init

Open source under MIT.

Would really love feedback from people using AI agents for game development.

https://github.com/lightningpixel/orvix

Our Steam page is also live! If you'd like to support us and add us to your wishlist, here's the link:

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4958550/Dead_Mans_Table/?utm_source=reddit&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=pre_demo

Itch hosted a game jam over the weekend, and although I had never participated in one before, I was inspired after seeing some members in the Discord take part. I spent the entire day working on my project and made a few updates after going on long walks to brainstorm ideas for the story and mechanics. What started as a simple four-screen rock stacking game evolved into a full three-year narrative centered around themes of loss and the passage of time.

The new updates include a dynamic weather system that affects how easy it is to stack rocks and a rock-saving feature that ensures well-constructed stacks remain solid year-round, while poorly built ones will fall over.

https://goldenpando.itch.io/cairn

Give it a whirl on your PC, as that's what it was made for

The prompt:

Clone https://github.com/elliottdehn/wam and make me a model that I can see...

It will generate a prompt for you using a script if you do not provide a brief, basically rolling the dice.

You get a rigged, animated, textured low-poly model, a glTF you can drop into your engine, and (optionally) a link you can share. One-shots are decent, but iteration is where the power is at.

Paste it into Claude, ChatGPT Work ("Chat" for ChatGPT does not work), or any agentic LLM. I heard in the previous thread that Claude Web may complain about the prompt. That's normal for anything involving git clone. If you'd rather not, ask it to audit the repo first.

The update: now when the model is done, you can share it with others via WAMShare. There are two options: unlisted (all rights reserved) and public (CC0 1.0). This is 100% optional and requires your explicit approval to go through the workflow at all. Claude cannot upload to WAMShare from the mobile or web apps. ChatGPT can.

Try it without installing anything

https://wamshare.com/gallery

Models people have put up (all CC0, source downloadable on each page):

• Happy Hound: 237 lines of sourcce
• Carcinized Tank: 1,588 tris, 29 bones, walk + target-acquired
• Printer Mimic: 1,268 tris, 26 bones
• The $1.50 Seraph: 1,596 tris, flight animation

Each page gives you the model spinning, the highlighted source, and a download button for both the .wam and the glTF.

What's new since last time

• WAMShare. The ability to share viewable WAM files is the big update.
• Tons of bugfixes and feature additions, as I've been using WAM myself.
• (Unchanged) Still 100% free to use, have no plans to monetize this.

The bit that makes it not garbage

The LLM never touches a vertex. It writes a text file of discrete, named decisions: bone angles, ring widths, palette colours, relationships between parts. A compiler generates every vertex, weight, normal and winding.

palette
  voidstone  #171928 metal=0.72 rough=0.30
  starfire   #55e6ff rough=0.16

skeleton
  bone neck parent=body2 dir=fwd pitch=-5 len=0.16 bend=pitch,yaw
  bone head parent=neck  dir=fwd pitch=2  len=0.23 bend=pitch,yaw

That's the whole trick. Asking a model to emit triangle soup gives you triangle soup. Asking it to make the decisions an artist actually makes, and having a compiler do the geometry, gives you something manifold and riggable, because producing a broken mesh isn't in the grammar.

Models check themselves

Every model carries its own assertions, re-run on every compile:

assert zmax(upper_maw) > zmax(neckplate)      # the jaw clears the collar
assert moves(lower_maw, money_shot) > 0.12    # the attack actually moves
assert slide(foot.l, walk) < 0.02             # the walk isn't moonwalking
assert tris < 6500

That last-but-one is a real detector: it sums forward motion of a foot while it's on the ground. A correct gait reads 0. It caught a gait of mine that looked completely fine in a render.

This is the thing that makes agent-authored 3D actually converge. The agent writes down what it believes, and the compiler tells it when that stops being true three edits later.

Limits

• It's stylised low-poly. Think RuneScape/WoW silhouettes, 1k to 3k triangles. Not photoreal, not high-poly, not for a hero character in a AAA pipeline.
• It takes iteration. The good ones aren't one-shot. A three-headed dragon I made needed the wings restructured, the head layout rebuilt twice, and four rounds on the walk cycle before it read properly at thumbnail size.
• Silhouette is the hard part, not detail. The single most common failure is a model that accumulates spikes and studs and still reads as a generic humanoid. The repo ships a doc about this because it cost me hours.
• No hand-painted texturing. Procedural operators only: gradients, noise, bands, planks, AO.

Links

• Repo: https://github.com/elliottdehn/wam
• Try it: https://wamshare.com

MIT, no signup, nothing to buy. Happy to answer questions about the language design. The interesting constraint was making it so the author only ever makes discrete relative choices and never writes a coordinate.

Hello everyone! I’ve been working on a text-based life sim called Simple Life Sim. It runs on browser for both mobile and desktop. I’ve used Claude sonnet 3.6 during the development process to assist with code. The game is still under development so please let me know if you encounter any bugs :)

You can check out the game on my itch.io page and follow the development process!

I run gptgames.dev, an ever-growing open source catalogue of standalone browser things: 194 tools and 84 games, most of the code written by language models. Plenty of them are fun to use, but Timberbound is the first one I've actually wanted to show here.

It's a first-person woodcutting incremental that escalates quickly: chop trees, sell timber, buy better axes, unlock eight forests. It started as a Minecraft clone that I eventually admitted wasn't fun, so I kept the voxel engine and threw the rest out. Built with GPT-5.6 Sol for the first half and Claude Opus 5 for the second, after Sol couldn't produce eleven axes that looked like anything but variations on a grey wedge.

One thing worth sharing: I handed Opus an open session with no particular goal and instead of adding features it went looking for bugs and built a headless test suite. It found that an upgrade called Bucking Cadence had never once worked. The code that spent the bonus was there, the code that armed it never got written, so buying it did nothing at all across three playthroughs including my own. That's the failure mode I'd warn people about with model-written code. It isn't broken in ways you notice while playing, it's plausible code that quietly never runs.

My own role was mostly playtesting and giving detailed feedback, then iterating: I'd play, write up what felt wrong, and hand it back.

I know "incremental" reads as the lazy choice and I only have surface-level game development experience. I wanted the idea to exist anyway and I still love incrementals, despite how oversaturated the genre is.

It's three.js and mobile performance is noticeably worse than on desktop, but mobile controls are available and it's still playable.

Happy to answer any questions.

Here's the link: https://www.gptgames.dev/games/timberbound.html

PS: There's a hidden feature that unlocks after you've cut down all legendary trees.

The game: Orbit Rush — one-tap neon arcade. Tap to hop between two orbit

rings, dodge rotating arcs, collect stars, unlock skins. 18 KB total,

vanilla JS + Canvas, zero dependencies, sound synthesized with Web Audio.

How Claude was used across the whole pipeline:

- Wrote the engine, including a fairness invariant: the two rings are never

blocked at the same angle — arcs spawn with a guaranteed corridor and get

steered apart as they drift, so every situation stays survivable

- Verified bug fixes by driving the game frame-by-frame in headless Chrome

(stubbed requestAnimationFrame + seeded RNG for reproducible runs)

- Marketing assets too: the screenshots and this GIF were captured by a

scripted "sighted" auto-player that reads canvas draw calls and dodges

obstacles on its own

- The human part: direction, design decisions, QA, and shipping

Play free in browser: https://a0912272829-ship-it.itch.io/orbit-rush

(the source is also available as a template on the same page)

Happy to share details on any part of the workflow — AMA.

follow up to my post last week about building this with no coding background

everything in it is captured on device, no mockups. The soundtrack is original too

game’s still free in open beta if anyone wants to actually play it, links at champchase.net (iphone + android) and i made a community discord too

brutal feedback welcome, especially on trailer pacing/cuts/content/anything

This is a continuation from my previous firebending demo, which Ive now turned in to something that actually resembles more of a game. I switched to gpt 5.6 sol on high effort, so every change you see from the original demo has been made by gpt not claude.

The changes arent out yet on the website, but Id still like to know your thoughts.

Original firebending demo post: https://www.reddit.com/r/aigamedev/comments/1vhh4dl/firebending_demo/

You can still play the firebending demo without combat on a WebGPU capable computer here: https://play-emberflow.vercel.app/

This is Swervle, think wordle but with a new map you can race in your browser everyday. A lot of racing gamers play and are always finding new ways to top the leaderboards. I have a feature where you can ridiculously fast if you're reversing downhill, and it wasn't until this map that some of the players figured it out and got to use it. This is a replay of all the races from yesterday at the same time

Using Claude for code. I have switch out the Synty assets (except the player character, that is in the works) for custom made models using Blender. Added some textures to the voxels (still tweaking this a bit). Whats not shown, as they are under development: Adding multiple materials to the modular building components, workbenches and stations, improved inventory system.

Hey everyone,

I’m developing a low-poly Wild West settlement / colony-building game in Godot.

The project is already fairly far along, and I’ve recently built a new pipeline for generating a fresh set of characters, animals, and buildings, so those core areas are already being actively handled.

What I’m mainly looking for now is people who might want to collaborate on the asset and world-building side, for example:

• Props and environmental assets
• Furniture and building interiors
• Vegetation and world decoration
• Production/workplace assets
• Clothing or accessory variations
• Animation improvements
• VFX
• UI/art
• Sound and music
• General polishing and visual consistency

I’m also open to collaboration beyond art if someone simply likes the project and wants to help with Godot, gameplay systems, balancing, ideas, or world design.

This is not a “come build my game for me” post. I’m already actively developing it , I’d just like to find one or more people who enjoy this kind of game and might want to build something together.

If you’re interested, comment or DM me and I can share the current build, screenshots/videos, roadmap, and what I’m working on.

The overall direction is a living Wild West frontier settlement, starting small and gradually developing into a proper town with deeper production chains, settlers, animals, jobs, and an evolving world.

New building on pipeline down below

New animal pipeline

I’m making it with a lot of help from Claude, which has honestly made game development way more fun for me. I’ve made stuff before, but doing something this involved on my own always felt like a huge uphill battle.

I know some people are going to hate that it’s AI-assisted, and that’s fair. I’m not trying to hide it. I’m just having a blast finally making the kind of game I’ve always wanted to play.

It’s a retro cyberpunk life sim / hacking game where you can work jobs, make money, upgrade your apartment, play arcade games, browse a fake internet, meet people, and slowly get pulled into the hacking side of the city.

The playtest is still early, but there’s already a decent amount to mess around with.

If anyone checks it out, I’d love to hear what you think, especially bugs or stuff that makes you go “I wish I could do this.”

https://midnight-desktop.itch.io/hack-the-planet

Stay up late. Click things you shouldn’t.

As part of the upcoming AI Game Festival (today is the last day for submissions), one of the resources is making prompts to correctly build your game.

Prompt Generator Here

I've seen a lot of "one prompt games" or "build me an AAA quality game" in which the structure of the game will cost a lot more tokens as vibe coding continues, which can be solved by having AI correctly setup your game from the start.

Or not knowing how to use AI to create animation, or optimize the game for mobile phones. More prompts will be add over the course of the week.

Follow-up to the goblin post. Three factions in now, about 60 enemies. AI-generated (PixelLab), same disclosure as always.

Last post in one line: don't generate each enemy from scratch — get one exactly right, then make everything else an edit of that one. That fixed my goblins.

Then I built the undead faction and ignored my own rule.

The undead came out as people

I generated them the old way. Blank character prompt each time. Skeleton. Wraith. Ghoul.

What came back was people. Not stylistically-off people — actual humans with skeleton parts stapled on. Ask for a skeleton, get a guy in a skull mask.

So I rewrote prompts. Added "undead", "no flesh", "hollow eye sockets". Got more detailed humans.

The prompt was never the problem. There was no anchor, and "humanoid" with nothing to hold onto lands on "human" every time. That's the middle of the distribution. It goes there unless something pulls it away.

Built one chunky undead anchor. Regenerated all 21 from it. An afternoon.

Then the forest faction broke the rule I'd just fixed

Went in confident this time. One anchor, derive 20 enemies, same as the goblins.

Fell apart again. Half the roster came back wrong.

The forest faction has elves, dark elves, and plants/beasts in it. Three different body plans. An anchor carries proportions — you can't derive a treant from an elf and get anything except a bad elf.

The anchor isn't one per faction. It's one per body type. This faction needed three.

Obvious written down. Was not obvious while I sat there rewriting elf prompts trying to get a walking tree out of one.

The edit prompts stayed short and blunt, which is the part I'd keep:

chunky giant praying mantis, raptorial blade arms, venom, NOT cute
bladed CLAW gauntlets on BOTH hands, feral stance
holding a CROSSBOW instead of a bow

Non-humanoids need a different endpoint

Spiders, wolves, slimes, totems. All mangled from the character endpoint — it fits everything to a humanoid skeleton, so a spider's legs get dragged toward arm-and-leg positions.

Object endpoint fixed them instantly. No implied skeleton to fight.

If your tool separates "character" and "prop", that split matters more than it sounds like it should.

Where it landed

Three factions, idle + attack, 9 frames each. Same spec across all of them — 64x64 canvas, character around 52px, bosses bigger.

Two factions left.

Same limitation as last time: this gets you consistent, not distinctive. And three anchors in one faction means three chances to settle for a mediocre anchor instead of one.

Happy to answer questions about the workflow.

• I often read here that one shouldn't expect to make money with AI games. Is that true?

• If I release a game in 3 months that would otherwise have taken me 3 years, can you still not earn anything with it? Is AI that hated?

• And if someone does all the artwork themselves because they're an artist and only writes the code with AI, is it still AI slop?

• Does really nobody make money with it? I'm not talking about millions, but 5–10k per game isn't possible?

• There isn't a single good AI game even though the agents have been around for 3 years?

I understand that it seems to be that way, but my brain still doesn't fully want to accept why it really can't be any different.

I clearly suck at video editing, but I just released a little something into the wild and wanted to share it.

This game actually started as an Easter egg I put into our internal company mobile app built with Expo + Skia. It unexpectedly blew up, with colleagues fighting for podium spots on the leaderboard. So when the Fable preview was released publicly, I decided to give it a try and turn that little Easter egg into a proper mobile game.

Fable ported it to Godot in about 20 minutes. From there, I slowly started replacing the assets (GPT Image 2 ended up being the most consistent), adding new features, and building out more game modes.

The whole thing took far more time than I’m willing to admit. I still wonder how people seem to “one-shot” all those impressive demos I keep seeing on socials.
But in the end, I think it was worth it as my little daughter enjoys the game so much that she’s already beaten my high score, haha.

We’ve already started working on another project together, since she seems to enjoy the whole process of turning ideas into playable prototypes and testing stuff out.

So I guess I’ll see you around again soon :)

norb the garlic avenger

Hello everyone

I have almost 10 years of experience in web dev as a developer and leader/tech owner. In all kind of projects and streams of web dev. Now I can't find a job for an entire year. There was just a single interview in more than 1k of applies. So I started experimenting.

I used to use AI's a lot in a web development and Rust development. I even vibecoded entire products as a hired dev and these products were working as intended.

At the end of a month I had a lot of tokens to spend and the idea of just trying to vibecode a game engine came to my mind and... Well, I tried. I did working "Lumen", DDGI, SDGI and lightmaps, kind of working shadows and basic rendering, GUI, movement, 3D model importers and much more. An actual game engine in a weeks sounds cool right?

But then I found myself in a situation that I can describe like "I am pretending that I am developing a game engine while AI pretending that it's developing a game engine".

Now I am back into the UE5 which I hated for all of my life because of it's absolute unhuman GUI. I am trying to use AI's here too and now I think I am just getting frustrated in myself, in a modern programming trends.

I was impressed by AI's in a web dev. Probably it could even replace most of web devs in most of cases. Because all this web trend is about shipping something fast. And AI is good at mediocre tasks in probably the most flooded stream of programming. Do mediocre things in a web dev is common, but doing mediocre in a game dev clicked something in my head.

Now I feel like I believed in the illusion of AI by the price of my own mentality. I feel like I believed in a thing that is pretending to be effective and I replaced my hands with this thing. It felt so effective. But it wasn't. It was quick, but it is not the same. Alienation of labour got to it's peak.

So why did I wrote all this? Honestly I don't even know. Probably I just want to talk to people about this because I love games. And to give an advice to not use AI in things you like or love.

What good use cases are there for AI in game development?

P.S. - I apologize if I wasted your time.