Should indie devs really have to suffer the consequences of being witch hunted and harassed when AAA developers are all using AI without disclosure willy nilly and get none of the hate? Let your voice be known in steam's survey for nextfest participants, remove the AI disclosure tag. A game should be measured by it's quality, not it's tag.

Title.

Virtually everything these days is created and/or maintained using AI. Including even operating systems on their phones. So why are people so against it when it comes to games?

For me personally it’s more about “did they just slop this out with minimal to no effort?” If so, then yes fuck that shit.

I’d say the same thing if someone manually made a game with minimal to no effort.

But if you’re pouring so much time and energy into DESIGNING a game and every knob of it is tweaked by you, then why should it matter if it’s built using AI or not?

I’m probably preaching to the choir, but I’d like to understand the other side as well.

So I know that the answer depends on how much time the person spends developing the game etc. But basically here's my question.

So one of my all-time favorite games are games like the first Darkest Dungeon or Curse of the Dead Gods. And there isn't really a game like that would be a follow up to that. There's been only some that are kind of similar but either bad quality or the combat is not great or they don't really feel like those games.

And since I'm really passionate about games in general and these kind of games, I wanted to create my own. I have no experience in programming but I'm a 3D artist. So maybe that can help me. Anyway, I was wondering if it's actually possible with using Opus and without doing any programming myself to create this kind of game with my own art assets or with the help of AI creating the art assets. And obviously, if it's not going to cost me more than a thousand dollars to create a full game like that because I'm not rich as well

I'm curious if someone has experience making something like this or a full game with Opus in general and how much they spent in both time and resources

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mujYKr1vHvg

[we should all be] they have a website, a Kickstarter and the whole social media going.

look, I am not here to tell you now to make a video game, I am currently working on an mmo myself, but making these no effort 1 shot prompts and then going out of your way to make kickstarter to scam people of their money, you should probably have a hard look at the mirror and come to the terms that your "game" is pure garbage and nothing more than a rug pull that most everybody can see from a mile away, and you are only damaging the path for the rest of us that are actually developing games, with iterations and work actually required make stuff enjoyable.

if your game looks like the pure garbage from above, do not try to rug people into wasting their money and time and instead work on the foundation of your "game".

I am always searching for solo / indie games on YouTube so the fact that this garbage came up on my screen gave me second hand embarrassment.

you are quite literally giving fuel to all the people who are already anti slop anti AI.

Been working on this for a while. You make a detective, hit one button and get a whole new 1920s case: the victim, six suspects with their own secrets, and the house. Then you walk the house, question the suspects however you like, and they answer in their own voices. Find the clues and make your accusation.

Every case is different, so I don't know who did it either until I play it.

Would you play something like this? What would you want from it?

Hey everyone! I’m kicking off a series of bite-sized videos showing off different mechanics and little details of Interstellar Consignment Shop.

The main reason? Before I sink hundreds of hours into final 3D art and heavy polish—which is easily the most time-consuming part of dev—I want to make sure the core gameplay is actually fun, intuitive, and heading in the right direction.

I really need your honest eyes on this: what looks good, what feels off, and what you’d improve. Once we build up our early community, I’ll be rolling out the closed demo and playtester interviews so we can shape the game together into something everyone truly loves playing.

Check out the retro hotsite to inspect the 3D items, and hop into our Discord.
👾 Discord community: https://discord.gg/MSW69vkppj
🌐 Official website (with interactive 3D items): https://interstellar-hotsite.vercel.app/

Same concept just a different skin and or worlds. Just image what the devs could create, this would be a cool game.

FYI just because you use AI in your game, does not mean it is safe from AI cloner. If anything if AI can make your game, it can clone it

I had Fable 5.1 go grab real wire frame measurements of an elite golf swing, shrink them down, use Nano Banana to create the character then had Opus 5.5 draw all the pixels on a real pixel grid for 12 frames with reference to a real photograph of a golfer.

The best part is that it's all real pixels, no mixels and 100% ascii and math based so creating new characters on the wire frame or scaling him up or down is a simple prompt

Edit: I had so much limit available this week which is why I used Fable but honestly Opus carried it through Fable is weird

Hi everyone, I'm Zeng, an indie developer from China. I was born in 2006 and I'm still an undergrad. I've been working on my game for five months now, entirely on my own. In this post I'll walk through, roughly, how I set up my indie dev pipeline.

A quick note: this is a beginner-friendly overview, not a deep-dive tutorial. Everything here is personal experience and opinion. I'm not trying to preach, so if you see things differently, I'd love to hear it.

First, you'll probably want some of the strongest models available to help you build the project, such as Codex, Claude Code, or Grok. I mainly use Codex and Claude Code, and Claude Code (CC from here on) is what I use most. And yes, Claude has banned my account before. When you hit a problem, you solve it. You don't look for a reason to stop.

My engine is Godot. I chose it because I originally planned to make a 2D game, and Godot is a great fit for that. Later the design changed and the game became 2.5D, with an isometric camera similar to Project Zomboid, so the game itself is actually 3D. If I had known it would be 3D from day one, Unity would honestly have been the more convenient choice. But Unity had split off its China business into a separate entity, which made things complicated for me, so I stayed with Godot.

Some indie developers choose to build their own engine. In my view that's unnecessary. Sure, you can now modify an engine through plain natural language, but there's a real downside: Godot has an open-source community, so most problems I run into already have answers there. There are also engine tutorials on YouTube and Bilibili, and the docs to read. If I built my own engine, the cost would be too high for me, and any problem would end up entirely in the agent's hands.

Honestly, I only really know Python, and I only passed my freshman Python exam on the retake. So the barrier is lower than people think. When you hit a problem, you work it out then. My coding ability comes from using agents. Really, it's the open-source developers on GitHub who paved the road, and I'm lucky to live in an era where I can use agents to build my own game.

You'll also need a GitHub account. Whether or not you plan to open-source anything, GitHub is a convenient place for version control and storage (you can make the repo private so your code isn't public).

Now let me briefly explain some agent basics, as I understand them. I'll borrow a formula from DeepSeek: agent = model + harness.

For the model: Claude has Haiku, Sonnet, Opus, and Fable; GPT has Astra, Sol, and Terra (these names change fast, so check the official sources). I won't go into each model's abilities or benchmark scores. You can just ask the AI itself to introduce its own models. Roughly speaking, stronger models use more tokens, think for longer, and have a much higher capability ceiling than weaker ones. But a stronger model isn't always the better choice (I'll share hands-on experience about this when I get to 3D rigging and animation).

For the harness, think of the model as a horse you want to ride, and the harness as the saddle and gear between you and the horse. It's the layer that lets you direct the model and get your agent to do the work.

The first things to do are subscribe to an AI plan, set up your GitHub account with the AI's guidance, then search GitHub for the MCP that connects Godot to the agent you use. That gets the most basic environment in place.

If you don't know how to set something up, don't worry. Take a screenshot, give it to your AI, and ask it to walk you through step by step. A good video tutorial works too. Some GitHub steps need you to do by hand; the rest your agent can handle directly, and the same goes for the Godot MCP.

In the next post I'll cover how the whole game development pipeline is set up, including how to manage your game design documents and organize your files. I use Obsidian and Feishu myself. If you use Notion or something else, the setup will differ and your agent can help you look it up. What matters is that your agent can read, create, edit, and delete notes on its own, without depending on you doing it by hand. Note-taking tools vary from person to person, so I'll only briefly describe mine.

If you'd like to follow along or get in touch, you can find me here:

• Reddit: Perilous Journey: Xixing
• X: Perilous Journey: Xixing
• YouTube: Perilous Journey: Xixing
• Discord: Perilous Journey: Xixing （Discord）
• Bilibili: 西行xixing
• Xiaohongshu: 西行xixing
• Douyin: 西行xixing
• TapTap: 西行xixing
• Email: [zczcz4090@gmail.com](mailto:zczcz4090@gmail.com)

What it is
Deepmarch is a never-ending action RPG roguelike. You leave town and push outward through six biomes, and every step further out raises the danger. Your best distance goes on an optional online leaderboard, and the whole game also plays fully offline. Down the line I want to add MMO-lite / co-op elements.

Genre: Roguelike, action RPG
Inspirations: Path of Exile, Diablo, Realm of the Mad God

What’s in so far

• 2 classes (Warrior, Archer)
• Passive talent tree
• Mastery system (upgrade and equip skill masteries between runs)
• Endless, distance-based world design with six biomes and a boss for each
• Modular equipment system: each gear piece changes your character’s look, across 5 visual tiers per class
• Loot with magic, rare and legendary items
• Quests (early)

Tested on: Android (Samsung S25 Ultra, AYN Odin 3), iOS, Windows, macOS

How it’s built

• Engine: Godot 4, GDScript
• Code: Claude Opus 5.5 as the orchestrator/harness, with Sonnet 5.5 subagents as the workers. Custom skills and hooks keep it on rails (test suites, capture tools, approval gates). Yes, the game is “vibe coded.” It’s taken a little over a week of work (8 days).
• 3D asset pipeline:
  1. Concept art and piece sheets from ChatGPT (Astra, GPT6.1)
  2. Bosses and weapons generated with Hunyuan3D 2.1, sometimes TRELLIS for texturing (e.g. a helmet)
  3. Blender for cleanup, rigging and export. Armour is modular: every piece is its own GLB on one shared humanoid rig, so any piece from any tier mixes with any other. The Blender steps are scripted, with automated checks on poly count, materials and bones before anything gets exported.
  4. Every asset goes through an in-game check: the game boots, screenshots the asset from the real gameplay camera, and I approve or reject it before it ships.
• Music: generated by code, not by an AI music model. A Python script composes each track from a seeded chord progression and melody motifs, plays it on simple synthesized instruments with an SNES-style echo, and exports seamless loops. There’s a 16-bit style track for the town, each of the six biomes, and every boss.
• Purchased assets: some UI art and sound effects come from Unity Asset Store packs I already owned from earlier projects: the Fantasy RPG GUI and GUI Pro (Minimal Game Dark) UI kits, Monster Sounds Vol. II, and The Complete UI Sound Effects Library. Only the pieces the game actually uses are processed and shipped.
• Trailer: my own gameplay recording, cut to the music with ffmpeg. The opening shot is a scripted in-engine camera (depth of field and a crane into the gameplay view), recorded straight out of Godot.

Background
I’ve been a full-stack software engineer for 10+ years. I’ve made plenty of games before and none of them ever saw the light of day (art was always the issue, and still kind of is 😢). I’ve always wanted to build a game like this, with real action combat.

I know the art is in a rough spot. My goal was to make a game that’s actually fun first, and I think I’ve finally hit that milestone. I’m sick of predatory, microtransaction-heavy games, so I built the game I want to play: one that respects its players.

What’s next: early-access builds for Android and SteamOS/PC. If you want to follow along, test early builds, or just talk pipelines, join the Discord: https://discord.gg/WfqkDHdB8

Happy to answer questions about the pipeline, the agent setup, or anything else. Feedback is very welcome!

Recently there was a post about finding what is missing from Steam. In that post a unique idea was a house cleaning game. I had this silly thought that a random number generator probably comes up with more unique ideas than that algorithm.

So I put it to the test. The prompt was essentially "Generate game ideas by pairing popular Steam genres and adding a random theme. Turn the first 25 into realistic 5-second gameplay clips. Create concept art to use as a reference". I didn't really put more than 5 minutes of thought into and just let it rip overnight and this was the result. I was quite surprised at the level of polish it bothered to add, but obviously a lot of it is still sloppy or carried by just one genre so not that unique. But it was interesting enough output that I thought I'd share it.

The next 5 ideas:

• Gothic - Third-Person Shooter x RTS
• Magic - Shoot 'Em Up x Rhythm
• Mining - Board Game x Bullet Hell
• Dark Fantasy - Survival x Farming Sim
• Western - Roguelike x Immersive Sim
• Fishing - Visual Novel x City Builder
• Rome - Top-Down Shooter x Dating Sim
• Space - City Builder x Third-Person Shooter

It takes me almost a month just to get a basic playable prototype of an Android game. No assets, no music, no VFX, nothing.

I'm running Codex around 15 hours a day, and progress still feels incredibly slow, especially with GPT-6.1 Sol.

Am I overcomplicating the planning process, is Codex just slow, or is this actually the normal pace of AI game development?

Genuinely curious how people are shipping entire games in days when it takes me weeks just to get something playable.

I'm using AI-assisted image and video workflows to create a promotional story for my Mahjong game. The main challenges are character consistency, natural hand movements, readable Mahjong tiles, and keeping promotional art clearly separate from actual gameplay.

Steam

Demo

I’ve been a software engineer for 10 years, with the last six working in Unity and game development, mostly VR, AR and 3D. I started an agency, and until recently all our work was for B2B clients.

Dead Mile was the first game I produced for our own players. I started it as a vibe-coding project. I knew how to build software, but I had very little experience getting a game in front of people.

For the development side: Unity AI helped with much of the code. I used AI for backgrounds, UI portraits, music and voices, alongside licensed character sprite packs. That let me move quickly, but shipping the first version was only the start. I’ve released around 20 versions in the past month and a half.

The useful part of the process has been watching what players actually do. I’m using PostHog to understand player behaviour and feed that back into changes to the gameplay loop. I now have some players still coming back three weeks after they started. That’s encouraging, although I’m still working out how to turn it into a sustainable game.

Distribution is where I’m stuck. Dead Mile got much more attention on unofficial/modded markets, while the official Google Play and App Store releases are getting roughly 20–30 organic installs a day. I tried Meta ads: around $300 spent, with about $60 in in-app purchases coming into the game. I can’t keep relying on that approach.

I’ve also built several other mobile games over the past month and had encouraging feedback from players. Getting them in front of the right people is the part I haven’t figured out.

For people here who’ve taken an AI-assisted game beyond the development stage: what brought you your first steady stream of real players? What would you test first with a tiny audience—small creators, a different way of showing the game, store-page changes, or something else?

And how did you decide whether you had a discovery problem or still needed to improve the game itself? I’d really appreciate hearing what worked for you, including things you tried that went nowhere.

Ran this non-scientific experiment over which model and effort could produce the most cinematic scene. They all received the same prompt, and were told to find free 3d assets online, they also received a reference image that chatgpt created.

Claude ran the experiment, to launch the four agents, and created the video. Do you think this could have been a biased experiment since claude ran it?

Haul and Hold: you grow your island from a hand of cards, your hero hauls wood and stone back to the keep himself, and bridges let you reach rival islands (and let them reach you). Then lead your armies, siege engines, to take enemy keeps.

How it's made: Godot 4.7, nearly all the code written by AI agents. Claude Code plans and reviews, Codex implements, every change goes through automated tests and an adversarial review before merging, and I review the visuals from my phone. The 3D models are CC0 packs (KayKit, Kenney); the sounds and music are AI-generated (ElevenLabs, Suno); the icon and splash are rendered from the game itself.

Play it here (phone or desktop, ~15 min for a Quick game): https://haul-and-hold.vercel.app

I'd love honest feedback on the game itself, and happy to answer questions about the AI workflow.

Hello guys.

I'm building a small project with Claude and I'm missing 2D dark fantasy graphics/sprites. Which AI do you think is the best to use?

It's not a week yet since I released my game in playstore and my expectations was kinda higher!! To get at least 100 download in the first week and maybe 1k in the first month! However I got less than 50 🥲 i tried marketing for it in many ways in ytb TikTok and Instagram.. some of my video was edited by Ai, I was satisfied by the results However many people wasn't!! And they start with [lol, ai slop channel,.. ] that makes me feel so bad honestly why people are too sensitive when someone makes something and use tools that everyone use.. i can't understand this part as well ..

Here's my game: my game but I don't really understand what's going on!

Im not gonna stop anyways lol its part of my studies so not like i could do stop!

Silent Entry is out on itch.io (Windows/Linux): a top-down tactical stealth game where you lead a police team through ten hostage missions. https://dystostorm.itch.io/silent-entry

How it was made

Me: the design and direction, playtesting, every judgment call on feel, the music (composed in Cubase), and the final say on everything.

The AI (Claude, through Claude Code): most of the code (~26,000 lines of GDScript) and the tools around it.

What worked

Tests as the safety net. 152 scripted gameplay scenarios (breach a door, talk a suspect down, snipe through a window) run headless after every change. The AI writes a scenario for every new mechanic.

Art as code instead of AI images. The 3D world is built procedurally from the 2D level maps. Characters come from scripted Blender files, and animations are Mixamo. No image generators.

It checks its own work visually. It takes screenshots of the game and reviews them before showing me anything.

Even the trailer footage is rendered by the game itself from scripted “shots”, then encoded with ffmpeg.

What didn’t

Tests only catch what they test. Two bugs shipped in the tutorial because the tests ran in conditions real players never hit: the lock station broke when a new game rolled a random door layout. My playtesting found them, not the AI.

You still have to play it constantly. “The test passes” and “it feels right” are different things.

Happy to answer questions about the workflow.

You already know what it is.
Silly clone, but with a dumb twist
It's actually pretty fun for a good hour of your time.
https://tommydenne.itch.io/needle-in-a-haystack

Without spamming my game here or on other subreddits how do you realistically approach getting your first 100 users?

I know that I need to start making gameplay clips and sharing on social media but they just don't seem to get any views. Maybe thats a skill issue but everything I make gets flagged for self promotion.

Here is a link to my current game which is still very early in development. For game like this how should I realistically plan on marketing it? Right now it's free on the browser but I do plan on releasing on steam and ios/playstore.

https://play.sunspireresort.com/

I haven't tried hyper3d yet, but recently i get their ad, every few hrs where it converts a image to a full 3D scene, has anyone actually tried it? and is it really that good?

Can someone explain how the workflow works with Opus 5.5? Do I simply describe what I want using prompts, and then it generates the code and scripts that I copy and paste into my game?

How do I create graphics and implement physics using Opus?

Could someone walk me through the entire workflow, from describing my ideas to actually building a playable game?
I’d really appreciate a clear, step-by-step explanation of how the whole process works.