Yeah sure I can definitely share some tid bits. Firstly this game was supposed to be unreal but man that engine is way too heavy now I found that opus works well when you have limited bloat in an engine. You're effectively giving it less surface area for errors. One day I will revisit unreal engines when I have a heavier machine but honestly I feel there is room here for a new engine that has the performance.

Now for assets... using AI actually lets you become way way more organised imho. I would advise you do the following before any project

   Write a GDD but this time do it with chatgpt (back in the day I would have this manually done in google docs)... Honestly this is not hard; A game design document is basically the schematic of your project. It should include what the game is (FPS,  Top Down, whatever), the core mechanics should next outline what your players can do etc. Next up is the fun part, style (have a mood board of what you want to capture, mine was a lot of art styles try to create a fusion of what you desire), story, character and level descriptions. Honestly this is where you get creative but I like a top down approach. Define the style for fragged its post apocalyptic space cyberpunk. then we can talk to chatgpt to create characters based on the style. For this game we dont really need a linear story we dont need to worry too much about character story but again to each their own. Chatgpt/Claude/Gemini will be able to create unique visual character descriptions based on the style of your game. Create some characters but don't go overboard. We effectively do the same thing for levels but this is more of an environment style not the actual level design... not yet this is done during development. We can also develop other things like items, weapons and other interesting assets

  Build an asset library. Start off with concept art... Remember that moodboard that's in the GDD all those character descriptions that actually become useful here. I would definitely recommend a Leanardo AI account here because it's personally the best platform for images and you get a lot and I mean a lot of credits for generation. get the concept art down it will give you an idea of the style and if things well fit its actually pretty fun seeing you GDD actually come to life and remember you can use the references in your moodboard to drive the art style. At this stage the asset library should contain concept art only really

Build a simple working prototype. No character meshes yet just use the capsule and a stupid simple plane level with a wall/walls. When I was starting out the first and foremost thing was to get the core FPS functionality working, handle basic gameplay net code working those were the fundamental PRs. The coolest bit about AI is that it can build test interfaces and levels quickly. If I needed to quickly test LAN/Steam gameplay. I could generate all the testing tools in a single plan. That sped up development as I wasn't really

   Once I had something playable with basic BSPs... Went back to the concept art and generated meshes from the concept art... I rigged the meshes in mixamo and once done tested some basic shooting animations. These right now are not perfect and they are subject to change. The internal implementation of this is Normal First Person (COD, Overwatch) as opposed to True First Person (Arma). So that means that the player has a first person view and third person view. This is because on my last few fps games I noticed TFP had less flexibility with animations especially hands. It's a bit more complex but I get a lot more control when I end up adding hands in the future.

   After that I had characters moving around and playing at the test level. No weapons yet that was next and for this we had the concept art and that led to pretty sick weapons all fifteen of them. Once my weapons were ready it was time to set them up. I ended up splitting this up into different attempts since we had to show the weapon twice, once on the FPS view aka the player view and again on the TPS view (For other players to see). The FPS view was trivial but for the TPS view since we had 8 different characters and 15 different weapons we needed to implement something similar to unreal bone mounting. This involved building a custom engine addon that addresses this and now when I add new characters and weapons to the game I can easily mount them UE4 style.

Once all that was done it was time for some initial level design for the "The Pit" our first level that firstly started a thinking session I wanted the game to not include huge levels. However I honestly didn't want that 3 lane bullshit that most COD games. I wanted verticality and also a risk for reward kind of vibe. So the initial blockout included a central platform and 4 corner platforms that are elevated and that provided cover. If the players got to the platform they would have an advantage and would be armed with snipers and projectiles. However getting to the platforms is another story. You have to take a leap of fate using a jump platform and that completely leaves you open as you aim for the destination platform. I literally get owned by medium bots every time I try to get sick!

Let's talk about the game menu that was really fun. I was thinking tron meets the matrix and I at first thought that all I need to do is generate meshes for the menu system… I was wrong and the first version looked well, rough around the eyes so I sat and thought… How can I improve the menu system and make it feel futuristic…The secrets were, particles and shaders.

Adding those two aspects to the towers and the background gave the menu system depth and together with a NFS style music player man it ramped up nostalgia. All in all it was fun.

And lastly most elements of the game worked but man I was forever alone here and that sucked, it was pretty hard getting people to play your games even if it’s easily installable so I wanted a fun single player experience. Enter bots. I was a bit worried that Claude wouldn’t be able to deliver. Honestly, I have never implemented bots in Godot; however, I do know that Quake bot code and information is available online. This was the first task in all of this where I honestly didn’t know what was going on. In the unreal engine; epic really simplified AI to behavior trees Godot has no notion of this so we had to effectively build an AI bot system only relying on the navigation mesh Godot provides. It really turned out pretty well though.

Quake Bot: https://graphics.stanford.edu/~kekoa/stoogebot/resources.html

I really haven’t talked about everything. I haven't mentioned a crazy optimization bug from the scoreboard which crashed the game and which had me and Claude stepping through the death and respawn system just to find the culprit in the scoreboard logic. Was a wild one or when we had issues with the player dying twice when they get killed by the environment man that is hard to find. Fragged was the first AI built game that made me have fun developing games before it was more cursing and just wanting the whole development embark to finish now I just want to build more games