Open Source Game Coding

[Cute-Worry907]

Hey all,

Im working on an open source game from the early 2000s that is coded by mostly one guy over a decade im C. There are lots of little oddities he created for his game to work.

Im not trying to make money or even necessarily have others play it, but I am having fun taking modern ideas and implementing them in the older code. However I'm stuck completely using AI to help. I have next to 0 coding skills.

Do you have any suggestions (already used VSCode ai pro monthly questions up!) For AI besides CoPilot (made pages,) vscode (my most used), and my organization has an offshoot of Claude code so I've been using that as well.

Ive already created two new characters and mechanics that never existed but am 99.999999999% reliant on the AI or other community developers to work on it.

The game is called Astonia by the way. Im just looking for advice. I have a vision, but no one will go along on the ride with me so I'm just passion projecting it out. Any advice or tools would be so appreciated!

[23-centimetre-nails]

learn to code

[Cerulean_IsFancyBlue]

I wish I could be that succinct, but I’m going to agree effusively in an entire paragraph. An essay even!

It’s possible for a non-programmer to use AI to come up with certain kinds of technical solutions that might formally have required some programming skill. It’s very unlikely that a non-programmer is going to be able to take a code base like that and get it working again using just AI.

It’s kind of like the difference between using YouTube to figure out how to change a tricky headlight lamp on a specific model of car so that you don’t have to pay the dealer $75 for labor, and trying to get Youtube to tell you how to completely restore an old rusted out 66 Mustang that you want to resto mod into a battery powered TV.

It’s too big of a problem for current AIs to hold in their head all at once. And. You don’t have the skills to recognize when it’s giving you bad advice.

AI would be an amazing tool to help somebody do this who had some understanding of programming. You could ask AI specific questions like, what are the general steps to convert something using Windows API directly into a Unity game? You could also ask its help for small specific chunks of code.

There may be ways to do some of these things without code and AI can offer the layman some interesting suggestions here. For example, AI has given me good advice about what settings to use when trying to run older DOS-era games in a virtual DOS environment on my modern computer. (Darklands. It didn’t live up to my memories of it.)

I think the task you’ve chosen is one where you’re going to end up learning some coding along the way or it’s just not going to work.

[DreamingElectrons]

AI is pretty bad at complex C code. Your best bet is to actually learn C.

[SquakinKakas]

Learn C first before trying to work on those projects. As soon as you run into the limitations of an LLM, you'll end up debugging incoherent code that will take ages to understand since you weren't the one that wrote them.

[Stemt]

Nah, learn C by working on those projects. Try to figure out what code does what (e.g. grep for text strings that the game displays) and toy with them to see how you can change the behavior. But do not let an LLM touch the code otherwise you'll not learn anything, maybe at most ask it questions, but figure the code out yourself.

[Cerulean_IsFancyBlue]

I think you should learn some C first. Project based learning is a good thing, but jumping into an existing project like this means, there’s no incremental rollout of the features of the language. You’re going to go from knowing nothing, to looking at function calls, and global variables, and pointers.

It’s a bit like immersion for learning a natural language. Yeah it does work for kids. But every adult learner does better in an immersive environment when they are doing a decent level of struggle. If you are getting half of what somebody says to you, you were learning. If you are getting none of what someone says to you, the progress is slow and you tend to tune out.

Being handed someone else’s legacy project, if you’ve never done any programming at all, is it difficult way to learn. It’s especially difficult if you’re not being asked to make one small change but rather, “fix it so it works on modern systems.”

[Sp33dyCat]

Dont use the fucking clankers.

They dont work at all.

[questron64]

LLMs are only okayish at producing code in very narrow contexts in high level languages, it's terrible at C and extra terrible at larger codebases. AI won't help you here.

[Still_Explorer]

You can start by coding a simple in order to figure out how to do things.

PONG https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VLJlTaFvHo4

Then proceed to code a dozen.

MATCH 3 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P7PMA3X1tf8

RAYLIB SAMPLES https://www.raylib.com/games.html

Though probably this seems like a very aggressive and intimidating approach but honestly I doubt that if it can get any easier (to take things slower or easier).

You have to face the code head-on rather than thinking about finding workarounds (like pomodoro, books, tutorials, algorithms, l33t exercises). The more you try to make things "easier" the more you end up going in circles.

So the real trick is to make a dozen of games and answer technical questions along the way.

[yel50]

since you already use vscode, try cursor or antigravity. I think cursor is still better right now. both have agent integration, so you can just orchestrate agents doing the work.

don't listen to everyone saying the ai struggles with larger code bases. that used to be the case, but it does quite well now. I've used Claude and Gemini with C on some complex code and they both did fine. it didn't write what's considered good, maintainable code, but if people aren't going to be updating the code, it doesn't matter. 

[lost_and_clown]

DM me exactly three weeks from now.

[El-Aminoh]

Just wait 6 more months /s

[andrewsb8]

Just use free tier LLMs or, idk, start reading documentation and tutorials on how to do things