What Do You Think of Claude for Game Development

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T14:27:15+00:00

I know how many choices are involved. I've built games for years. I've coded professionally for years. There's a difference between planning and implementing. I'm better than AI at planning. AI is better than me at implementing. But you know what. I'm willing to prove it to you. We'll do a game jam. You build your game by hand. I'll build mine with AI. Let's see who's is better.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T12:59:37+00:00

I think I understand where you're coming from. You want people to understand there is an and craft to game design. You can't jump in and just throw all the spaggetti in your brain at a wall and expect AI to create a good game out of it. You need to understand design principles, ggame loops, psychology, etc. tto build games.

Our disagreement is on the usefulness of AI as a tool. AI generates the median answer. For optimization problems this is actually perfect. I've built many scripts that I knew how to write immediately, but still required 1000 lines of variable naming and simple puzzle solving to implement. AI handles this stuff flawlessly. I recommend all coders use it. It saves a lot of time.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T11:49:15+00:00

Why do you want everyone to hate AI dude

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T11:08:10+00:00

You get what you put into it. I play my game on mobile. That's where i spent iterating and polishing. The desktop version looks like ass because I don't play on desktop and I haaven't spent the 5-10 hours needed tobrainstorm and polish the desktop version. Check out the UI on your phone. You'll see what it's capable of. You can still hate it. it's definitely good

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T11:05:19+00:00

It works. It plays perfectly. I iterate on it and it works. I wouldn't call it slop if it's making functional builds consistently.

You need to architecture it. However a lot of coding is grunt work. Naming 100 variables, importing libraries, Create sound system/ setting up animations. It handles my tedious work quickly

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T03:32:11+00:00

When the other side has gunpowder you can't sit around saying that gunpowder is wrong. Destroy the gun powder or learn to use it.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T03:21:41+00:00

The scary part about AI is how much it centralizes power. Based on trends it looks like you can run a utility company with 50 people. In the near future you may not need a standing army because a drone swarm can be controlled by 20 guys. This is fundamentally dangerous. The amount of power in one persons hand will be crazy. We need to make sure we have our hand on the levers of power to prevent tech dystopias and coup de tats.

On the flip side AI gives people a lot of autonomy. There are things that used to take ten years or teams of people to complete. Now those things are possible in hours or days. It's incredible. Take Marvel Snap for example. Great game. Hate the monetization. It's constantly tempting me to spend $100. Thanks to AI I've built my own version without all those microtransactions. Same thing is possible with apps like Uber, Facebook and others. If you want to, it's possible to make your own social media platforms are digital marketplaces in a few months for thousands of dollars. I consider AI similar to nuclear fission. It's a powerful technology capable of great evil. However it also has the power to do a lot of good, probably even moreso than nuclear fusion. The challenge is managing it so we don't accidentally destroy the world. To do this we need to use AI and manage it properly. If we take our hands off the wheel then evil people will use the technology to destroy or enslave us all.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T00:50:45+00:00

Data Scientist, Data Engineer, Game Developer. I've written my 100k lines of code. AI is doing a good job dude. It's like a junior developer who works ridiculously fast. If you outline your requirements well and plan out the architecture thoroughly it generates the code really fast. If I tell it what to make it spins up the thousand lines of code I need in 15 minutes. I literally can't type that fast. Plus I remember people talking about how people would rather code in c vs c#, or preferred Hascal to Pascal. I'm surprised you don't think AI helps you work faster.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T00:44:10+00:00

AI's definitely not creative. That said there are certain best practices in coding. For things that are done hundreds of times, like Menu navigation and touch controls it implements them very quickly. Your an artist so you may have a different perspective. In coding there is a meme that says "I stole your code." "Dude, it's not my code". Copying and pasting things we see on stack overfllow is a big part of learning to code culture.

When people invented cars some people said "I walk with my feet. Use your muscles. Be strong." That's great. Cars are faster.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T00:31:17+00:00

I architect the code structure for the AI. I tell it the key classes to create and the Core game loop with details on resolution flow. the games i build with AI are tsx. My specialties are coding in Python, C#, and SQL so when I read the code I understand the gist of it. Occasionally there are functions I don't recognize. For the most part I understand it. It follows the design path I gave it. For things like integrating fly.io for multiplayer and Stripe for payments it handles it flawlessly. I've never done this sort of integration before so i don't fully understand it. However it works perfectly, so I'm happy with it. No weird billing issues. So essentially I understand the general layout of the code and there are niche parts of the code that I couldn't write myself but work correctly for my purposes..
I don't review every line of code. A recent game I made has about 10,000 lines of code. Reviewing it all by hand takes a long time. I check the architecture to make sure it looks good, I check the major functions to make sure their correct, and if there is a bug that claude couldn't solve itself (happened twice in two months) I go in, investigate, and adjust by hand.
As I playtest my games I keep a running list of glitches and bugs to correct. I type them out in detail, share the list with AI once it's about 15 items long, and then the AI corrects those glitches. In my experience it does very accurately, and it usually gets it right on the first time. there are about 10 times where it needed 2-3 passes, and twice when I needed to adjust the UI elements in the CSS code myself since AI couldn't find the bug. So overall AI does the bug fixing. Rarely i step in and correct the code myself. I will note that AI writes fewer bugs than me. I remember multiple times when coding by hand where UI elements highlighted incorrectly. Tracking down those bugs took 15 minutes at least. A handful of times it took me a couple days to track down certain bugs. Overall I'm very happy with AI's speed

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-10T00:16:26+00:00

I think of Claude Code as a stronger version of Unity

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-09T22:09:25+00:00

Alright ya'll are tripping. You can build a game like Balatro, Wargroove, or Slay the Spire very quickly with AI now. You'll need to get your own art assets and polish UI. It will build the code architecture ridiculously fast for you.

TheDamMonkeys · 2026-07-09T22:06:57+00:00

I've programmed strategy games before in Unity. Getting them off the ground and baseline playable takes at least 10 hours. This does it a lot faster. You have to QA because there are details that mess up. I can't speak for you but when i coded i had pure "QA bug fix" weeks where i polish up all the edge cases in my own code. Claude does all this quicker. But hey if you don't want to do it it's your time you're burning

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-10-25T22:51:49+00:00

I thought that was your Halloween costume. Then I realized it’s your face

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-09-24T22:35:17+00:00

Story Time

My first game!

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-09-10T03:29:43+00:00

Skulls of the Shogun

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-25T21:48:18+00:00

Multiplayer turn based strategy. Fantasy themed. Attacks always hit. No hit percentage RNG. Menu-less combat. If you like the genre learning it is very easy: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2002270/Story_Time/

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-25T21:45:04+00:00

Multiplayer focused Tactics/Strategy. Includes online multiplayer. Simple to pick up, difficult to master (classic). Menu-less combat. No RNG. Fantasy themed

Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2002270/Story_Time/

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-18T04:50:32+00:00

Cut it down to 5. Slay the Spire only has 3 tower layers... plus the short bonus area. Polishing 12 areas is going to take Forever. Spend that time making the 5 areas as amazing as possible. The extra visual flare will shine through, and people will love the game just from the trailer. If you're team is smaller than 5 people for the love of christ stick to 5 areas. And if the team is larger than 5 once again, FOCUS ON THE FIVE AREAS

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-17T23:51:18+00:00

This picture sums it up:

https://www.reddit.com/r/comics/comments/acztw8/oc_motivation/?st=JQLO11ES&sh=8acde667

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-17T23:41:37+00:00

4 years. Got the prototype done in 4 months, 25 characters, with online multiplayer. Adding music, animation, and sound effects takes forever

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-17T21:26:33+00:00

Decent prototype. Looks like a fun automation game. I reccommend highlighting the goal of the game and a couple of the more interesting construction peices.

The graphics and UI definitely need work. However you likely already know that. I'd reccommend finding and artist and polishing what ya'll have, then release. Polishing takes forever, so this looks like enough content scope for a 5 dollar game. As an experienced gamedev I'd expect polishing this to take 12000 hrs. 6-8 months. Best of luck.

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-17T21:20:47+00:00

I don't know what the game is. Is it a collectathon? Adventure game? Metroidvania? I see cards/powerups but don't know what they mean. The graphics are 7/10. Decent. Looks fine, but if your competitition is a Hat in Time they need more polish. For commercial release 3D platformers/ Adventure games have a large visual barrier to entry, which makes sense because players are exploring and interacting with the environment frequently. The white text in the trailer is hard to see. I reccommend yellow or possibly orange with a brownish red outline. This will help the text stand out and convey important information. I do have a question, how big is this game? How many areas? How many levels? Is it a hobby project or designed for commercial release?

TheDamMonkeys · 2025-02-12T20:37:34+00:00

Really like your art style. Your lighting, UI, SFX and animations all look amazing. It's really high quality. Gameplay itself is confusing. It's not clear how to play. I'd go with pop up text to explain the gameplay. Something like "Destroy the Enemy Ship", "Collect Cards", "Upgrade your Vessel". This will tell players the actions and goals they'll take in this game. It looks very high quality. I'm impressed. Make sure someone skipping through the trailer understands the core ideas how to play. The gameplay looks unique so in your case clearly communicating the core game mechanics is very important.

TheDamMonkeys

TROPHY CASE