alt Hacker NewsI was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG). Some years ago, my career was derailed by major health developments. Since then, I haven't been able to work as I once did. I didn't expect I'd be able to meaningfully contribute to a game again.
Earlier this year, a colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. :) Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state.
Tentatively called Vestiges, it's a single player 2D roguelite strategy game with meta progression, some narrative, and a card minigame (the latter inspired by work I did on Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic II). It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories.
I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.
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For all the bad rap that AI gets in game development, stories like this should be heard more. I occasionally get tendinitis and I can't code for the entire day like when I was young. I get some relief dictating to the AI when I need to rest my hands. I can imagine it's a much bigger help for someone who is struggling with worse.
Glad to hear. I could say I'm in a similar position actually, but my setbacks have been more psychological.
I am also interested in trying this game out! And I'm really glad to hear how agentic coding got you back in the game (literally)!
This an inspirational comment, thanks for posting it! I love that more and more people are being enabled (or re-enabled in your case) as software developers thanks to ai.
Big fan of SW:KOTOR series. Would love to test Vestiges when ready.
You should consider creating the game on Steam, so you can start building your audience.
I would like to play this demo when it comes out.
That’s just pure pazaak! Would totally like to see this game
I'd be interested in the demo!!
I'd love to try it out too.
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I'd like to hear more about your experience using AI for game development.
I've had a strangely asymmetric experience where frontier models are failing apparently basic tasks like making changes to a Pong clone without breaking it, while the same models are successfully designing and implementing multiplayer servers with rollback netcode!
I think it has to do with what they can and cannot verify (i.e. they can't actually play pong to see if they broke it), but I'm not sure.
(Also happy to hear anyone else's experiences on this matter!)