I'm a solo dev making **Death Leaves a Trace**, a free old-school isometric MMORPG (Unity 6, Windows and Linux), with Claude Code as my co-developer. The second closed alpha opens on **November 26** and I'd love some of you to come and break it.

**The game**

• An island with two towns, hamlets and around ten dungeons with 12 bosses (the Rat King, Urzog the orc warlord, a vampire count...)

• No classes: stats and gear make your style (sword and shield, two-handed, bow, crossbow, mage)

• 26 spells across 6 schools, all with hand-made effects; each school has its own temper, fire fast, earth slow and heavy

• Enemies that adapt (casters switch to melee when you close in), masters who teach skills, 40+ quests, 367 items

• Death is not the end: the Stone of the Temple calls you back. PvP with a criminal reputation, later in the test

**Join the alpha (Nov 26 – Dec 10)**

• Sign up (free): https://deathleavesatrace.com/alpha2/en

• 100 spots, around 40 still open

• Discord: https://deathleavesatrace.com/discord

---

**For those who want to go further: the setup**

**DLT Studio.** Before any content, Claude built me an in-house editor so I could design the game myself :

• The Cartographer** (map editor): paint the ground, place buildings and props piece by piece, brush vegetation, drop monster spawns, portals and ambience zones; the game imports the map as is.

• The Workshop (bestiary): 165 creatures and NPCs with stats, resistances, weapons in hand, look and loot tables.

• The Forge (items): damage, armor, requirements, bonuses for every piece of gear.

• The Studio (quests, merchants' stock).

(The tools are in French, my native language.)

**How the work is split**

• I direct: game design, lore, art direction, decisions. Claude writes most of the code and drafts a lot of the content, which I review.

• Claude drives the Unity editor through the Unity MCP: it enters Play mode, runs scripted tests, captures the game view and checks its own work before telling me it's done.

• Spell effects and icons are modeled in Blender through the Blender MCP, then turned into particle effects in Unity.

• Several Claude agents often work in parallel (spells, lighting, the launcher...) and take turns on the Unity editor through a simple lock file.

**Keeping it under control**

• A private tracking site with a **Validation** tab: I test each new feature in-game, grade it out of 10 and leave a comment. Claude reads it and fixes whatever I marked "to review".

• A small Python model simulates fights for each level bracket and playstyle, so balance changes are checked before they ship.

• A decision log, so a choice I made is never reinterpreted later, and a lore bible for the canon.

• One script rebuilds the Windows client, the Linux client and the dedicated server, checks the combat rules, then publishes the update through the launcher.

Happy to go deeper into any part of it in the comments.

I posted my No Mans Sky inspired game a couple of days ago and a lot of you liked it.

The game went viral and got featured on "Today's News" on X amassing over 400k views and 800+ reshares. Over 5.000 unique players have played the game.

The crazy part is I made the game in around 40min spending $65 on the game. This is a huge signal for every vibecoder out there. We get a lot of backlash from game devs and AI-haters. But the numbers don't lie. Keep believing and working on your AI projects.

A lot of the criticism I got was "You copied another game" "You didn't do anything of value". So I updated the game with dynamic space battles, which I showcase in the video. You can be exploring a planet, leave orbit and get caught into a galactic war, fully seamless. That's an original idea I will keep building on.

I always loved the idea of space pirates and will keep working on this game with that as the core feature.

It's available for free in the browser :)
Play Sky Reach

I used Claude Opus 5.5 as the builder and connected it to three tools: Higgsfield for images and video, AssetHub for 3D models, and Epidemic Sound for audio. Then I told it to keep building until it had a finished game.

https://x.com/sol_defamed/status/2111055448904552904?s=20

Play it: https://gta6beforegta6.xyz

What's in it

- A 2 x 2 km Miami-style map: downtown, a beach with dunes, canals, suburbs, hills, a forest, a highway with flyovers, and a marina

- Walk, run, jump, swim and dive, drive cars and boats, shoot, and steal cars from drivers

- Pedestrians, traffic, police, wanted stars, a day-night cycle, a radio, a minimap, and a full map with GPS waypoints

- Graphics settings from Low to Ultra: shadows, ambient occlusion, motion blur, depth of field, god rays, fog, and an underwater scene with fish and light patterns

How it was built

It wasn't really one prompt. First, Claude asked me questions and wrote a spec. Then it worked through 11 phases, and I approved each plan. Every phase ran the same loop:

1. One AI agent writes the code.

2. A reviewer agent reads the changes, and a tester agent plays the game in a real browser, takes screenshots, and looks for problems.

3. Anything serious goes back for fixing before the phase counts as done.

My job was approving plans, approving anything that cost money, and saying "looks wrong" now and then.

Stack: TypeScript, three.js, and Rapier physics. It has 161 unit tests and 11 browser tests that actually play the game, run automatically by GitHub Actions. It's hosted on Railway.

Where the assets came from

- AssetHub: the player, a female pedestrian, the sports car, the police car, and the speedboat, each turned from an image into a 3D model. The characters are auto-rigged. That used 318 of my 350 free credits.

- Higgsfield: the menu art, loading screens, the logo, and the trailer.

- Epidemic Sound: about 60 sound effects, menu and chase music, and 6 radio tracks. Claude searched the library, then cut, loudness-matched, and looped everything with ffmpeg.

- Free CC0 assets for textures, skies, trees, and props.

Bugs worth sharing

- A physics engine setting was checking all 40,000 colliders on every physics step, costing 15 to 40 ms a frame. The fix was one line.

- Compressing the 3D models silently doubled the size of every car body, while the wheels stayed normal.

- The automated reviews caught grass rendering black, wave foam in ruler-straight lines, and swimming straight through rocks.

Performance: It holds 60 fps on Medium in every test scene on an M4 MacBook. A first visit downloads about 22 MB, and repeat visits load from the browser's cache in about 2 seconds.

It's a fan project, not affiliated with Rockstar or Take-Two.

Try it, break it, and send me bugs and feature ideas. What should I add next?

Play for free: https://lacyan.itch.io/to-be-a-god

Four months ago, I started making a game inspired by my favorite manhwa, Pick Me Up. I'm a solo dev, and I now have a playable roguelite with 2,000+ heroes.

The crazy part? Claude Code helped me set up and operate practically the entire pipeline.

• Development: Claude Code helped build the game and its systems.

• Local AI: Helped set up local models and the generation workflow.

• ComfyUI: Operated through Claude for generating sprites and assets.

• Blender: Used through MCP to create buildings and environments.

• Trailer: Also made with AI.

The game itself is an auto-battler where heroes fight autonomously, but you can throw them, issue orders, or possess them and fight manually. Heroes have distinct combat behaviors, and permadeath means losing one is permanent.

I've also built a hero-generation pipeline designed to scale toward 100,000 heroes with different appearances, combat styles, quirks, and personalities.

Honestly, four months ago, coordinating all these tools would've been overwhelming for me alone. Having Claude help operate the whole workflow made this project possible at a scale I wouldn't have attempted otherwise.

The game is completely free. I'd love to hear what other Claude users think, especially those using Claude Code with local models and external tools.

Hi Folks,

I have been having fun with reverse engineering things using Claude, I wanted to find a discord group but couldnt find one specifically about using ai agents. I think its one of the coolest things ever so I made one.

If youre interested in this, come join and share your projects:

https://discord.gg/h3saJzNN4a

This video is extremely silly and unserious. That said, I am a total nerd for documenting process and results. Put it all together and you have me walking through what's it's like to "Start an indie studio" (whatever the hell that means in 2026) and going through my goals, my AI game dev process and more importantly of all - my current expenditures and total sales.

I'm now at $20 life time sales on my $3 early access game on Itch.io

I figured this subreddit could use a bit of levity. Enjoy.

In 2007, BlackBerry harshly refused to adopt the concept of smartphones that Apple introduced. This refusal for technological improvement left them in the dust and they lost everything.

Nowadays, a huge part of the world is like BlackBerry. People just don’t understand how useful and how much of the future AI for your personal projects is.

People are so anti AI that you genuinely question if they ever questioned how it’s actually used in game development. If you claim your game is made with AI assistance be assured that you’re not going to sell it.
Did you hear the recent Big Walk game disaster?
This insanely popular and liked game had a bug that slowed its running down to 50% during sunset and sunrises.
The studio asked the engineers how to fix this, the engineers said there is nothing that can be done.
They asked a chatbot and in a minute it found a 10 lines of code block that needed to be changed and now the bug was fixed. 10 lines of code, not even 0,1% of the game. That was the only time AI was used.
They disclosed this to the public and in one day the reviews dropped and people asked for refunds.

Guys, trust me on this, the general population doesn’t care.
It doesn’t care if you did the planning, the idea, the hours spent improving and polishing, the money you spent out of your own wage, they only care if you used AI.
For them it doesn’t matter if you never managed to learn coding and can’t afford a developer that will give you in 8 months a mediocre result.
It doesn’t matter if everything else is man made.
It doesn’t matter if only 0,1% of the game is AI made, they only care about complaining about the water usage (all while staying on social medias for hours on end which spends far more water than a normal use of a chatbot).

So, if you want my suggestion: nobody is pointing a gun to your head to tell the truth behind the development process of your game. Big companies literally encrypt and try to hide as much info as possible to the general public.
I’m not saying lie, I’m saying just don’t disclose it.
These people, just like blackberry, don’t understand. Time needs to pass for them to adapt to the change.

Never
Ever
Disclose
AI
Assistance

I know nothing about coding. I tried to make like zombies or battle royales with claude and use the browser server option the games look so bad and the quality. How do I fix this?

AI build it using Claude and through MCP and some kind of tricks i became my own Game Master and Director!!! If you want to see the outcome you can play to see how it feels https://play.unity.com/en/games/11174fde-0bc1-4b2d-b81c-8aa317b3754b/goku2build You can do it too!! :-)

And here i posted more videos with hints how to pass the level1 :-) https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLaJgcWlpZhwo

Hope you enjoy it and start thinking I can make it too!!!

You can find me on linkedin Profile

Christabel is an Ai e-girl who plays Stardew Valley live on Twitch with nobody at the keyboard. Claude built her with me and she's been learning as she goes... but she was skipping half the game. So I pulled her off the main stream for a few days so Claude could rebuild how she actually plays.

She can fish now with the real minigame, go down the mines, do quests and bundles, and build a coop and buy chickens from Marnie. Her first mines trip she killed 8 things, got hit 12 times, passed out at the entrance and lost 149g... and she ate a stone. Twice. That's fixed now lol

She's not allowed to cheat either, she can only do what a normal player with a mouse could do. Her voice is a clone that runs locally and her hologram's mouth moves with it. Live she runs on a small local model and Claude only jumps in when the local one messes up.

She's coming back on a brand new farm soon. You can have her do things with !task or just talk to her. Be nice she's learning ;)

https://www.twitch.tv/humanityzai

If you seen the trailers for this game then I know some of you might’ve been a little sad once you actually got the game to see the graphics and state that the game is in. Before I say anything, I’ll be first to say I like the game a lot and have put lots of hours in the game. But with the recent use of Claude being able to recreate games and make modding easier, I have to ask, do you guys think this could be a project that Claude could be useful in remaking a single player version of this game? I’m sure if people were savvy enough they could even update some of the graphics. Just wondering what the community would think of a claude developed single player version of this game.

They were doing an invisible maze quest and found you can wall jump infinitely on invisible walls. Should I keep it in as a easter egg?

Not a game in itself, but a tool that can be useful for generating backgrounds, art or assets for a game.

I've spent some time in this sub being a bit in awe. Rotoscoped video pipelines, Claude directing and reshooting a mech battle through an editor bridge: I'm well behind that, and I know it. What I've made is smaller and plainer, so here's what it is and exactly how I made it, in case it's useful or you can tell me what to do better.

I'm between jobs, not a programmer by trade, and I do this in the early morning, roughly 4 to 6am, around everything else.

What exists

• Six free daily-puzzle games at dailyrom.games. One puzzle per game per day, same for everyone, no accounts, ads or tracking. NULLFIELD (Minesweeper where every board is solver-checked so none needs a guess), OXIDE, CONJECTURE, DEADHAND, DECANT and THREEFOLD. Free. They also run as an Android app, which is the website in a Trusted Web Activity.

• ROM Hollow, a roguelite platformer, on Steam

• DEADHAND on Steam

How I use Claude

I split it into roles. Claude in chat is my designer, editor and reviewer, and writes the specs and prompts. Claude Code is the implementer, one session per repo. I own the decisions, play-test every build by hand, and publish.

• Specs first. Each game starts as a written brief, and Claude Code reads it before touching anything.

• Cause before fix. For bugs I ask it to report the cause before changing code, and to show any new check failing against the old code first.

• I read its reports sceptically. I look for claims it reasoned instead of observed, and anything it couldn't test becomes my hand-test list. Recently it told me a volume setting probably resets after a music duck, and flagged that it hadn't run it. That's now on my test list, not in my head as fact.

• Automated checks aren't enough. Once, every check passed on ROM Hollow while every sector rendered as flat rectangles. A check only catches what you thought to write.

• One source tree per game, build flags, no forks, and nothing is hand-patched in build output.

Other tools: Steamworks and steamcmd for Steam, Netlify for the site, PowerShell for builds and uploads, GitHub. Sprites and sound in the games are generated by code (bit-array sprites, Web Audio synthesis), not by image or audio generators. The exception is some ROM Hollow store-page art, which is AI-generated and flagged as AI-generated on Steam. Experimenting with Godot and Claude Code too.

I'm also learning about pushing to GitHub Repos using Claude Code and/or PowerShell - I had no idea!

Really, I'm making the games for fun, as a portfolio of learning, if they get popular on the way that's a bonus.

What I'd like to hear

Someone told me ROM Hollow looks more like a game jam than a commercial release, and I think that's fair. I'd like to know what specifically makes it feel that way to you: the art, the movement, the menus, the store page. Also, did any of the free games confuse you in the first thirty seconds?

Thanks for reading, and for the ideas this sub keeps handing me.

DOMINION STRIFE

Fantasy strategy card game

⚔️ Peer to Peer multiplayer

🤖 AI battles

🃏 20-card decks

🔥 5 lanes

💀 Sacrifice mechanics

...

PLAY / DOWNLOAD

https://jxmdollas.itch.io/dominion-strife

Join the discord, let's build a community.

https://discord.gg/kE8RnAgyH

All ideas are original, coded by Claude

just wanted to share my rules, as someone who was anti-AI, to now using claude while coding my hobby project:

1- never do something you cant do yourself.

i am great at maths, but only on pen and paper. formatting mathematical formulas into single line code blocks irks me. my game uses a bit of formulas and fractions. i let claude translate it, but then attach it myself.

2- begin your writing

with normal code i can already write, but where i will have to touch so many dependencies, i either do it myself once, or i write all the function headers, return types, initialise the variables. so far, i use small script files with deterministic outcomes to have 1 feature going. i comment after the function head exactly what to do and then its as simple as to do it.

3- ask claude questions

for things i struggle in doing myself, new code concepts, or game engine unfamiliarity, i ask it in a session where it doesnt have write-access. it's important to never lose track or ownership of your code by becoming dependent.

4- surprise its memories

a good way to make sure your code isnt turning stale is when you do edits, dont tell claude you did, and it always comes back to report the memory mismatch. this is good. because then it will explain what it thinks is different or what the outcome of it is. this strengthens the memories it has and also you get a reminder on places the edit may affect that werent fixed yet. win-win.

does anyone else have any tips on doing this? im tired of people in my life telling me that i should just "prompt the ai to make the game" and question me for taking 4 months developing with no product done. making the game is 70% of the fun itself.

I'm considering getting Claude Pro to make a modest indie RPG. I'd like to let Claude Code work autonomously, writing code, testing and fixing bugs, ideally running 24/7 and automatically resuming after usage limits reset.

For those who've used Claude Pro for agentic game development, how much work can you realistically get done before hitting limits? Can you automate it to keep working around the clock, or are the five-hour and weekly usage limits a major obstacle?

Is Pro enough for a project like this, or would I realistically need Max?

I'd appreciate hearing about your actual experiences and what I should expect for $20 a month.

Hey everyone! I am making a game called India Simulator. My goal is to make a game that is extremely fun to play, as well as to bust the myth that AI in games is pure slop. I used AI for everything, except the idea, the vision, the story and the concept. The goal is to launch it on steam within this year. I have made several games using AI already but all of them were mobile games and browser games. This is my first 3D Game. I'm using Godot 4.7. I'm super excited about the whole thing coz ive been a gamer since birth but hadn't learnt programming but now I can actually make games !!

Sooo 10 years ago a much younger self wanted to built a very complicated energy sim / tycoon game. On my original reddit post a bunch did want to join me and the post gained traction but I was neither a developer back then nor did I have the time creating such a game really.

Now? Thanks to claude, my educational path, job history in energy and a lot of feedback from other players and friends I finally was able to built something I can play myself.

Oh another AI slop game

You may be thinking that, but I genuinely believe that what I've created together with the community would have taken a solo developer or even a game studio an enormous amount of time to build, especially for such a niche audience.

And to me, that's one of the best use cases for AI-assisted game development: making it possible to create something incredibly specific for a relatively small audience that otherwise might never have existed.

How I used claude:

I almost exclusivly used claude code for the development. I setup how I wanted to have the initial game to look like and what tools to use then iterativly improved with the feedback I have gotten. The initial game was much much different to what is playable today.

A lot of the mechanics, UI, and overall gameplay evolved through countless iterations and discussions with the community. I think that's where claude really shines. It allowed me to experiment with ideas, quickly see whether they worked, and change implementations without having to spend weeks adjusting / refactoring every little feature myself.

What was most valuable developing the game was setting up a test harness with explicit targets. This is a little bit easier if you have a physics based game in development than a purely new thing though so it might not apply to your usecase. For example it checks that the energy balances are correct with every new additio.

Just wanted to share <3

The beginning is free to play, while the full game is paid to help cover the costs of development and hosting. You can try it here www.powerstate-game.com (but honestly its mostly for energy nerds <3 and a couple of tycoon freaks)

Nightfall is a browser battle royale I built for a Solana hackathon with Claude Code. You only see what your torch lights. Everyone else is just footsteps coming from a direction until they step into your light. Free to play, no wallet or signup: https://nightfall-blitz.vercel.app

How I used Claude:

• Claude Code wrote nearly all of it. I picked the idea, played it a lot, and told it what felt wrong.

• Game rules live in a pure Rust module: combat, hearing, loot, weapons (battle axe, war hammer with knockback, spear with 2-tile reach), powers (ender pearl, cloak, flare) and the shrinking border. It wrote unit tests for the rules first, which caught a few balance bugs early.

• Rendering is three.js with blocky Minecraft-style characters (original art, no Mojang assets), torch lighting, fog-of-war memory and hearing arcs that point to where footsteps come from.

• Every sound effect is synthesized in code. There are no audio files.

• Bots come in three styles (archer, brawler, mixed), so you can drop into a match without waiting for players.

• Playtesting: it drove the game with Playwright, played full matches against the bots and fixed what broke. Matches ended too fast, people died right at spawn, and trees hid the player from the camera. All three came out of those runs.

• The fog of war is real: positions live inside MagicBlock's private ephemeral rollup (a TEE on Solana), so even the match host can't read where other players are. That part took the most back and forth.

Other tools: Rust/Anchor, TypeScript, Vite, three.js, Playwright, MagicBlock ephemeral rollups.

The clip is from the trailer, which Claude Code also edited from one webcam take of me talking.

Two things I'd love feedback on:

1. From the clip, does "you can only hear them" read clearly?

2. The border waits 60 seconds before it starts closing. Too long?

Using Claude with blender and godot. The main things that made a huge difference was first to use claude to create the overall plan with me and then to slice it so very small executables so I could control and focus on each step of the game. Creating the first playable version allowed me start understanding where to focus my development efforts.
The second major improvement was using gauntlet loop to upscale all the visual elements of the game. It did took some time but made a massive difference.

I managed to make the game out of my interest. As a westfalia owner I made my loving take on the #vanlife loop of posting for followers, working odd jobs, improving your van and camping setup and trying to find a place to sleep before you get too tired.

Claude has also helped me a great deal on managing the launch.

Hope you like it!

https://apps.apple.com/app/id6819058231

I was questing in my game when an adventurer NPC started buying up all the troll oil in a shop.

When I asked her why, she said “Trolls.”

I pried further and she explained that she needed the oil to burn them to death because they regenerate HP so quickly. Fire stopping regeneration is implemented in the game, so her plan would actually work.

She just went and did this herself while I was busy questing lol.

I've been building Lore & Legends Maker solo for three years. Claude helps turn world notes into NPCs, factions, encounters and adventures. I use Claude Code and Codex for development, then let Claude play through adventures to help find problems.

NPCs have beliefs, goals and motivations, with world state tracked separately from the AI's narration.

Attached gameplay from a different scene. Still plenty of rough edges, but this is the kind of thing I wanted when I started building it. The current browser alpha is free to play.

Play: https://www.llmsaga.com/

Discord: https://discord.gg/Cr3pQx6SXE

Hello everyone, I am a very private person, but I wanted to share my experience with Claude in the past 2 weeks. I have worked in game dev for the past 7 years on a proprietary game engine as a tool specialist. With the latest enhancements to Claude, I wanted to test out how far I can push it by writing a new game engine from scratch. I was quite surprised how Claude Opus 5.5 (on Medium Effort) was able to basically build it with my guidance. I haven't written a single line of code during this process. Additionally, I've only worked on it after work and on weekends.

The engine is built with a Vulkan backend, uses Jolt for physics, SDL3 for window management and many more libraries. It also uses a C++ UI framework I've built with Claude on the weekend before I started this project which I call Silky UI at this moment.

Some of the art is procedurally generated but I think man-made assets are still a completely different beast. I've used mainly Mixamo, Quixel Megascans (Fab) and Poly Haven and other CC0 assets. Same applies to sounds - some are procedurally generated, some are from Freesound (CC0), usually polished and cut up by Claude. All the vehicles in the video were generated with Claude besides the Bugatti EB110 which is from here: Bugatti EB110 by ᗩᒪE᙭. Kᗩ. licensed CC BY-NC 4.0, converted for the engine.

I hope you find my experiment interesting, I certainly did. Maybe I will try to make a proper game with it in the future, but for now I quite enjoy experimenting with the renderer and also with testing various UX / usability ideas in the editor.