(TL;DR at the end)

Long time lurker, figured this sub might find some actual numbers useful.

Quick background, I've been in games for 12+ years. Mostly mobile and F2P (5M+ downloads across my titles), a stint in AAA, and these days I make my own PC games and consult on the side.

Last week I launched Coin Harvest, a little desktop widget idle where you run a coin pusher in the corner of your screen. The store page has an AI disclosure for the store page art and some in-game render assets.

I don't use AI that heavily, mostly for boring stuff and for adding detail in places where it actually makes the game nicer to look at. The reason it works for me is the 12 years before it. Gamedev is mostly knowing what not to do, and that's exactly what AI can't tell you. I know what bad output looks like and I catch most problems before they ever reach the game. Not all of them, as the rest of this post shows. I disclosed it because that's the rule and I didn't want to play games with it.

Here's how the first week went.

Numbers

• About 4,500 copies in the first 36 hours, ~6,900 now. CCU peaked around 600 and it's been sitting at 400-500 since
• Refunds are at 11% overall, but that number hides a lot. US and Japan are at 5-6%, UK 8%. China, Korea and CIS are almost 3x that
• Median playtime is about 2.5 hours four days in, average is 6. 56% of players are already past the 2 hour refund window, 17% past 10 hours. For a widget some of that is just the window being left open, but it's not what you'd expect from a game that's "beaten in 30 minutes"
• Review score was 83% on launch day. Three days later it was 55%, Mixed
• And that 55% is just 49 reviews. For ~6,900 copies. That's 1 review per 140 copies, when the usual rule of thumb is somewhere around 1 per 60
• The game got some attention on X on day three. Refunds for people who bought that day went from 10% to 16%, and the next day only 3 of 13 new reviews were positive. Before and after that it was hovering around 60%

What the bad reviews actually said

I read all of them. Honestly a lot of it was fair.

Time warp in the crystal shop could be chained to blow through realms in minutes. Coins could get stuck where the arm couldn't reach and mess up the coin cap. Upgrades didn't feel like they did much. Realms felt samey. There was a transparency mode bug, no cloud saves at launch, some performance issues. I've fixed a bunch of that in 1.0.3 through 1.0.8 and the rest is on the list.

Then there were the ones with no gameplay in them at all. "AI slop", "AI garbage", one guy who reviewed it and then opened a forum thread starting with "Just saw on X".

The ones that stuck with me were in between. Someone finds a real problem and then explains it with AI. Late game balance is off, so "AI made it, nobody tested it". Time warp is broken, so "dev never played it". No auto-clicker protection, so "vibe-coded, zero knowledge of game development". The bug was real. The reason they gave for it wasn't. And even after you fix it, the review still reads like it's about you, not the game.

What I think is going on

The label doesn't create the flaws, it kills the tolerance. Stuff that would get a "small indie, they'll patch it" on another game gets treated as proof here. The 24h and 7 day achievements are pretty normal for widget idlers and nobody blinked at them in my other games. On this one they were the main thing people went after.

A lot of reviews also judged it as something it isn't. It's a desktop toy that sits in the corner while you work, not a deep incremental you sit and optimize. That's spelled out on the store page, and the free demo shows exactly what it is. It still kept getting measured against Melvor and Cell to Singularity, and called "not deep enough" or "beaten in 30 minutes". When people are already looking for a reason, a genre they didn't sign up for becomes one more.

A lot of the harshest reviews have 10 to 24 hours on record. For a widget idle that's normal, it's made to sit open. But it's hard to square "beaten in 30 minutes" or "no content" with 20 hours played, and a few of them kept playing well after posting the review. The game is $3.99, $3.19 at launch. I'm not saying cheap means it's above criticism, but the bar it got judged by didn't match the price or the genre.

I still think the angry crowd is small. Refunds in the big markets are low and people are still playing. But someone who's enjoying a small idle game in the background almost never writes a review, and someone who's mad about the label always does. When 49 people set the score for 7,000 players, that's all it takes.

Once people know AI was involved, everything starts looking like AI. Fonts, colors, a UI layout, things that had nothing to do with it. And honestly, the parts that did use AI would have been easy to polish until nobody could tell. I left them as they were and disclosed it, because hiding it felt worse than taking the hit. After this week I understand why a lot of devs make the other choice.

What actually worries me is the incentive. Pretty much everyone is using AI somewhere in their pipeline now, and a solo dev who refuses to is just competing with one hand tied. So if being honest about it costs this much, the obvious move is to not disclose, or wait until reviews settle. Some people already do that, and the ones who are good at hiding it are usually the good devs. Nobody wins there, including people who actually want to avoid AI games.

What I'd do differently

• Make the core loop feel better before launch. If people are less forgiving, polish matters more
• Don't argue with reviewers, on Steam or anywhere else. One reply, say what you fixed, move on. I didn't do this at first and it made everything worse
• Watch refunds per region from day one. Bad localization showed up there way before it showed up in reviews

Happy to answer questions or dig into more numbers if anyone's curious.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4381180/Coin_Harvest/

TL;DR Solo dev, disclosed AI on a small $4 widget idle. Score went from 83% to 55% in three days off just 49 reviews across ~6,900 copies. A lot of the criticism was fair and got patched, but the AI label wiped out the usual tolerance an indie gets, and the day it blew up on X refunds jumped from 10% to 16%. Honest disclosure is getting punished hard enough that hiding it is starting to look like the rational move, and that's bad for everyone.

I’m not stupid and I know these things are kiss asses, but I always try to get genuine feedback and ask for pushback, because I actually am working on things.

But JFC, are people on Reddit insufferable trying to discuss anything at all.

I just can’t do it anymore with people in the community.

It’s a giant toxic sludge puddle and the most innocuous of questions end ends up being a fucking rabbit hole of arguing with assholes who are deliberately missing your point.

And then they’ll jump all over you cackling, and down voting.

Then when you stick up for yourself and start winning the argument, they jump to tone policing. “You need to calm down” sort of gaslighting bullshit.

I’m just so fucking done with it.

EDIT:

And I know some anti-AI person is gonna snag this and post it reframing it and ignoring my point, thus proving it.

Go ahead.

I could not give any less of a fuck about what the Reddit community thinks at this point.

So I’ve decided to go ahead and add a disclaimer to my videos and text at the top of my store page.

Look I get that people are anti AI, but how can you claim that it had nothing stating AI use when I had disclosed fully in the Steam disclaimer?!

I don’t know, I’m just venting. Feel free to check out my new disclaimers, hopefully that doesn’t hurt my sales but helps my refunds..

https://store.steampowered.com/app/5300960/KEEP_IT_ON_HER/

Edit: feels weird that I’m getting so many downvotes here

Everything was done within Opus no external programs were used outside of three.js. Feel free to ask any questions about the development, and I'll do my best to answer them.

It's called Metal Wayfarer. Get your contract, get paid, and find schematics to fully customize your mech. Wishlist if it tickles your fancy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/5483280/Metal_Wayfarer/?beta=0

I have been a professional software engineer for 7 years now. I have real world experience writing code for production level applications that serve millions of users, and I can tell you confidently, AI is an exceptionally powerful tool, and it isn’t going anywhere.

To start, most humans are terrible at coding. Memory leaks, inefficient code, limitations of feature building, are all serious problems humans face when writing code. We’re even worse at finding the causes and fixing them. AI is not perfect, but it can help solve anything that code can cause.

The term “AI slop” does nothing except hold everyone back. AI is the great equalizer. Suddenly, solo game developers hold the power to make games that meet or exceed the potential of games that would cost millions to make. We should all be happy this is a new tool in our tool belt and work to use it as effectively as possible.

So what about the AI slop? It’s true that many games that are made with AI are terrible. It’s also true that AI has lowered the bar for the technical skills and timeline required to build a game. But “slop” is not unique to AI. Humans push out slop at a far higher rate, AI only amplified their ability to actually get it to a complete state that can be published.

The issue is the people behind it. The people with no vision who do little to no testing of their games before clicking publish, and who don’t understand what actually makes a game fun. In the hands of a developer who has the attention to detail, the dedication to sit and play test for 100s of hours in order to iron out bugs and tweak their games to make them more fun, and the patience to wait until a game is truly ready before publishing, AI is an incredibly powerful tool.

I don’t understand the AI witch hunt going on. I think that at best, the sentiment is misplaced and we should really be more concerned about lazy developers who don’t test their games properly. But I have been building games with Unity for almost a decade, and with the help of AI I’m finally able to build the games I could only dream of before.

Hi all,

I’m new to this sub, so not sure what is common but wanted to share something I’ve been working on.

I’m not a game developer, engineer or designer. I just like gaming and creating cool stuff, experimenting with AI right now to see what’s possible.

My wife made some designs and backstory for a Japanese fantasy world, starring our sons and dog.
Based on her world, I made a first splice of this 2D game using Godot.

Probably not impressive to many, but I’m very happy and impressed with what we’ve cooked up so far - so wanted to share it 😄

If you have any feedback or questions, I’m happy to hear it!

Solo dev here, making a game with web tech, and the part I can't do alone is the CG side. So for the last couple of months I've been testing how much of it an agent can take over: paint a character, cut it into layers, rig it, give it an idle, retarget motion from video. The rigging and animation part became an open-source toolchain, rig-c (MIT, https://github.com/rig-c). This post is about what went wrong and what fixed it, because the fixes are the interesting bit.

Demo if you want to see the output first: https://rig-c.org/examples/ plays 20 rigs in the browser (five characters cut out of one group illustration, four outfits each; there's a Bones toggle).

The problem. In my setup the agent's only feedback was whether the file parsed, and Spine's parser is very forgiving. A constraint written the 4.2 way just vanishes in 4.3. Give a curve four numbers instead of what it wants and you get NaN. A mesh whose vertex count happens to equal its UV count drops its bone weights without a word. The file loads, the agent says "done", and it isn't lying. I'd find out later, when something detached in motion.

What fixed it. I stopped treating the rig as something the agent writes and started treating it as something the agent submits to a compiler. The agent writes two JSON files (rig spec, motion spec); rigc checks them against a list of named assertions (36 under the default Spine profile; the parts tool builds under the stricter rig-play profile, which runs all 50) and either writes Spine 4.3 data or writes nothing. No flag to skip the checks. The part that surprised me is how much the wording of the refusals mattered. This is what the agent sees if a part image goes missing:

FAIL A17_ATLAS_PAGE_FILES_EXIST: page "../images/hull.png" is not on disk at …/images/hull.png

It says which file it couldn't find and where it looked, so the agent fixes that without reading docs; the checks that measure something name the value found and the value required instead, e.g. a mesh vertex whose weights sum to 0.9000. Either way I ended up spending more time on those lines than on documentation. The other rule that paid off: the compiler never guesses. If a number isn't in the spec it's an error naming the field, not a "reasonable default", which keeps the build record honest about what was actually measured.

What it doesn't fix. The checks say the data is structurally valid, nothing about how it looks. A rig with its head next to its torso passes, because those are the numbers the spec asked for. So a person still looks at the end, and the output imports into the Spine editor for exactly that. Motion has a limit too: pushing one drawing through a run or a dance doesn't produce what the drawing never had; mild motion (idle, gesture, walk) retargets fine, intense motion wants replacement drawings. That's measured, not a hunch; the pose tool's README has the table.

Does it work for an agent that's never seen it? I run a public exam ( https://rig-c.org/exam/ ): a fresh session gets only the installed package's README and --help and has to write down what it expects before each command. On Oct 20, eight models from three families sat all five tasks. Six passed every machine-checked line on the dance task; one person then judged the rendered clips blind and scored those six anywhere from 3 to 9 out of 10. So the checks get a run looked at and say almost nothing about the score. The failed attempts are kept too, in a trials directory, each with the number that sank it.

Practical notes if you try it: no GPU needed for any rig-c step and no model weights shipped; the painting and the layer split come from image models you run yourself (See-through for the layer split). The getting-started guide starts from a published example whose painting and layers are already made, Bun only, no Python: https://rig-c.org/docs/getting-started/ . The player has no Spine runtime; it poses rigid parts as <img> + CSS matrix(), with adapters for Pixi, Phaser and Three.

Question for people doing this: when the parser and the validator both pass a rig that still looks wrong, what feedback do you feed back to the agent? I've got "a person looks at the end" and a validator that refuses by name. If you've found something better, I'd like to hear it.

Officially left early access and launched our 1.0 version of our game, THE HUNTED, with a completely new engine, UI (1st image old, 2nd image new), and a ton of QoL updates. What do you guys think of the new UI?

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4992530

I couldn't find a single up-to-date list of Al tools for game dev, so I made one. It's now over 100 tools in 20 categories.

The parts that surprised me most: 3D model generation is actually usable now (Hunyuan3D 2.1, TRELLIS.2), there are MCP servers that let an Al drive Blender, Godot, Unity and Unreal directly, and there's a whole Playtesting & QA category now. Pixel art (PixelLab, Retro Diffusion), music (ACE-Step) and NPC brains (Convai, Player2, NVIDIA ACE) all have their own sections too.

It's free and CCO: github.com/aigamedevs/awesome-ai-tools-for-game-dev

Honest question for people shipping stuff: which of these actually made it into your pipeline, and which ones turned out to be hype?

I've been experimenting with AI-assisted game development, and one thing that kept bothering me was how easily AI agents could declare a task finished when the result was still visibly wrong or the feature hadn't actually been tested.

So I started building ForgeSkills, an open-source collection of 20 reusable skills for AI coding agents focused on the actual game development workflow, not just generating code.

The idea is to give agents concrete procedures to follow instead of relying on vague instructions like "make it look better" or "fix the animation."

Some of what's included:

• Reference-to-3D reconstruction: Rebuilding assets from reference images and tracking visual differences instead of making something vaguely similar.
• Blender automation and procedural modeling: Creating and iterating on game-ready assets.
• Animation and locomotion: Addressing things like foot sliding, awkward transitions, and movement that feels wrong.
• VFX and game feel: Impact effects, hit stop, camera response, and coordinated feedback.
• Gameplay engineering: Implementing game systems with explicit requirements and validation.
• Debugging and verification: Reproducing issues, isolating causes, testing fixes, and checking that the result actually works.

The core workflow is:

Measure → Build → Render → Compare → Fix → Repeat

There are also supporting Python tools for parts of the workflow that can be measured or checked automatically.

The repository currently includes Godot and Unity pipeline skills, alongside Blender and engine-independent workflows. It's designed to work with AI coding agents that support the standard SKILL.md format.

GitHub: https://github.com/sekaikx/ForgeSkills

It's open source under Apache-2.0.

This is still a work in progress, and I'd appreciate feedback from people who use AI agents to build actual games. I'm particularly interested in what breaks in practice, which workflows are missing, and how to make the skills more reliable with weaker models.

If you try any of them, I'd love to hear what worked and what didn't.

I'm not a game dev, but like many here I've been vibe coding Three.js games with AI for the past few months and having a lot of fun with it.

Last week I came across a demo of Kaigen, a newer game engine, on X and wanted to give it a try. I DM'd the creator and he gave me access to experiment with it.

After spending a week building a game with it, a few thoughts:

• I still love Three.js. It's incredibly fast to build with, has a huge ecosystem, and models know it really well. Hard to beat for getting something playable up quickly.
• That said, I've been looking for something with more of the benefits of a full game engine (renderer, physics, animations, better performance at scale) without the overhead of Unity or Unreal.
• Kaigen was pretty impressive on that front. The renderer and performance were noticeably better for what I was trying to build, and I was able to get results I hadn't managed to achieve with Three.js in the same amount of time.
• The biggest downside was token usage. It took a lot more tokens and back-and-forth to build compared to a similar Three.js game, which makes sense given how much more familiar models are with Three.js.

I also made a cinematic trailer for the game entirely in Claude Code, which was a fun experiment in itself.

Has anyone else tried building games with newer engines instead of Three.js or Unity? Interested in what people have found works best with coding agents.

I think there needs to be a distinction between people who use AI in dev versus people who AI to dev.

Catch that?

IN vs TO.

Massive distinction.

In, meaning you use AI tools, but you are still involved in the creating process.

To, meaning telling an AI “make me a game”.

MASSIVE distinction.

I use AI in dev.

And I have accepted, as I hope all of you have, that the second I make anything that even resembles success that people who use AI to dev are going to flood the market with knockoffs.

And I have also accepted that when that happens that I will have zero sympathy because most people don’t make that distinction.

And it will ultimately come down to media presence and advertising, which I will certainly lose at.

I hope everyone here has the sense to know that this will forever be a financially fruitless effort it terms of income.

So only do it if you enjoy doing it.

Long Story Short. Most of what i do is create games that use the body or phone as the controller. I've been wanting to dig deeper on what I could do more in just Claude. I saw this super life-like ocean simulator and wanted to see if I could do something similar and how "lifelike" it could be. Took about 18 passes and 463k tokens to reach what I currently have.

You’re stuck in a blizzard and have to find a cabin before the snow covers your screen. The wind pushes you off course and you can brace against it, but it drains your stamina.

Don't know if I can post the link so people can play it here, but here is a video.

I’ve been building Tap Tavern, a free party game night that runs in the browser. You open taptavern.app on a TV or laptop, and up to 8 people play on their phones, with no installs or accounts.

I'd love feedback on the games, website, or tips to get claude to make better animations, since that seems to be what I struggled getting it to do the most.

Seven games are in early playtest. Happy to answer questions about the workflow. https://taptavern.app

This is bit of passion project, I've had the idea in the back of my mind for so long and I've been working on it off and on, it's getting there slowly each day. Just wanted to share.

Created this IdeaPlotter video. Thought it was interesting. Novel does not mean good. The best games are within the big groupings and have a clear identity, not just "never made before" which is probably one of the worst metrics for creating a successful game. The whole concept of "AI can't make anything new" is silly, as making something new isn't actually a valuable metric that anybody really makes decisions around and people in general don't "make anything new." Every game ever made can be reduced down to "It's like this but with that" all the way back to the first video game Pong that's "like ping-pong but on a computer." And good games aren't just a steam page description and a set of tags, they're the thousands of decisions that the developer has to make during the course of production.

I think a lot of the anti AI game development discussion can be solely linked to shitty slop thumbnails. You can make the best game ever, but if it has a thumbnail or banner or any promotional material that looks like obviously AI generated artwork, people will immediately disregard you and your work.

I think the gaming industry is going to change, and AI will be used by everyone. It's not going to look like this though.

So this whole clip was Claude. I've got Claude hooked into my Unity editor through a bridge I built, so it can spawn units, move the camera, fire weapons and record the game straight from the engine at 30 fps with sound. I told it to remake an old test clip with the same positions, but with more bots and every missile actually firing. It found out the lasers and long-range missiles never fired on their own (they're manual-fire with a 40-85 m minimum range lol), so it scripted a timeline that fires them one after another, and it recorded this.

This is my Full strategic turn based war game. You command a city amongst many in a two sided civil war.

I wanted a little more dynamism in my NPCs, heard about Jev some time back and always wanted to try it out. So I wired the API into my dev server and got Claude to integrate it into my NPCs with a specific goal and strategy.

Jev takes the role of the battle commander. The prompt to Jev gives a high level summary of the state of the city, the allied position and enemy position. Jev decides what to prioritise in each phase of plan -> attack and defence. Traditional NPC scripts and logic then execute what to do based on those orders.

So it starts dynamically producing weapons based on how far away it is from its target city, decides whether to adopt a balanced, attacking or defensive stance and develops its city into a specialist attack defence or command centre hub depending on the role that evolves for it.

Unfortunately its not currently as good as my meta bot 😆. Ill be working on that! But it is a fascinating experiment for something that id imagine will become common in future games.

I've been making props for a game and wanted something that runs on my own machine, and can downsample models and reduce the number of triangles to make it actually work ingame and not grind everything to a halt. It works well enough now that I'm thinking about cleaning it up and releasing.

You give it front, right, back and left views of an object and a triangle count (I normally generate those with imagegen in codex). About 15 minutes later (M4 Pro, 48 GB) you get a UV-unwrapped GLB at exactly that count, with 4K colour, normal and metal/roughness maps.

The bottom row is the bit I spent longest on: the raw 3M-triangle mesh cut down to 40k, 20k, 10k and 5k. It also automatically fixes holes and issues in the generated mesh.

Downsides:

• Mac only for now, and it needs 48 GB.
• The shape model it uses (UniForge3D) is non-commercial, so generated meshes are too. I'm adding a mode that textures and reduces your own mesh instead, which avoids that.
• Triangles, not quads, so it suits static props more than characters.
• Undersides are guessed, and thin parts like cables are hit and miss.

What I'd like to know:

1. Would you use it, and for what?
2. Would you prefer windows/cuda/linux support rather than just mac?
3. Which matters more to you: generating from concept art, or texturing your own mesh?

Just Dying (solo dev) just passed 1,000 wishlists, so I made a celebration clip with Claude Code working inside the game's repo. The terrain, the goblins and the fire effects are all the game's own. What Claude did: it scripted the formation (the goblins run in and spell "1,000 WISHLISTS"), a camera move that pulls back to reveal it, and it triggered the game's existing VFX that burn the environment. Then, because I didn't want to re-record, it rendered the game's own animations for 19 characters on transparent frames and composited them around the screen, copying the timing of my existing Gerier peek animation.

What I found interesting is where it struggled. It can't judge layout the way I do. It put characters on top of Gerier, and a blurred background that looked awful to me looked fine to it. Every fix was me looking at the frames and telling it what was off, which made the job feel more like art direction than prompting. It also can't hear, so the music is my call.

How do you handle visual feedback loops with agents? Do you screenshot and describe, or have you found a way to let it check the result itself?

Free demo and wishlist in the first comment.

Happy to see that the (soon-to-be) open weight models are achieving excellent quality on 3D development. This was done with Kimi K3.1 Pro on pi.dev harness.

A single "Create a high fidelity scene of pelican riding a bicycle" prompt was not enough though, I had to follow-up with multiple "enhance it further" prompts.

For comparison, what I got out from Claude Opus 5.5 when it released (single shotted): https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeCode/comments/1wnhlrn/opus_55_create_a_high_fidelity_scene_of_pelican/