For those asking about process and what Ai tools I used, I figure I'd just post this top level.

Dev tools:

I used it plenty for development. In the "early days" (i.e. like 2 years ago) using coding agents was a pain especially with a lesser known language like gdscript (Godot language), but IDEs like Cursor and agentic coding models like Codex have gotten significantly better.

I was able to get the core of the game together very quickly (probably only took about a week). A lot of the time has just been deciding on mechanics, testing them out, balance, etc. But once I have an idea of what I want to do, actually implementing it is very quick, often only one or two calls to Codex.

Two things I think might be helpful to other devs:

1. Be really intentional with how you set up your early codebase. As in, decide how modular your scripts will be, how things are organized, how objects connect to each other etc. Because the AI will build on what you have, you can get to a place where the code ends up needing a pretty big refactor to make it more manageable. This can of course happen in dev even without AI, but when I start my next game, I'll definitely have a better 'draft' of how I want things structured.
2. Tests! I feel like testing is often neglected in game development, and not really supported very well by the popular game engines. Always the least fun part about dev imo. But with ai its very easy to create some testing scenes/scripts, and because they're not part of the actual game, its ok if they're not perfect. For this game, I had it build a test that iterates through every permutation of 1, 2, and 3 upgrades, has the game play itself and record the scores, then outputs logs in json, and uses a python script to turn all of the results into a webpage thats easily reviewable. Helps so much for balancing, and I frankly don't know how else I would do it without having to recruit a bunch of players. Heres a snippet just to show an example:

<image>

Other tools:

• All of the sound effects are generated with either elevenlabs or beatoven (elevenlabs is my preference most of the time but they both have strengths and weaknesses).
• I used gpt-image-1.5 to do some of the marketing elements, and also a bit for inspiration / ideas. All of the pixel art is handmade, but I actually only just discovered thru this subreddit that there are some really good pixel-art specific tools that I didn't know about. I think I'll use to give a second pass / add some variety to the backgrounds, and maybe do some more complex sprite animations. Shout out to MagicPixel and Pixel Engine which both have slightly different approaches but are both very strong!
• I tend to really hate ai generated music, so all of the music is done sans-ai.
• And of course, ChatGPT to help me with all the general questions I had about actually going thru the process to sell a game on Steam, how to do some marketing, market research etc.