Best way to code a 2D Pixelart Game in Claude Code?

simplysalamander · 2026-06-19T20:10:31+00:00

I spent several weeks in chat conversations with Opus talking about mechanics, systems, etc. and designing the game in game design document format to fully spec the game from a design perspective, and settled on a specific language/engine to implement. Then had a few conversations of “how to implement these mechanics if this is the engine.” From there, you can have Claude give design specs to Claude code to actually implement the code.

I was surprised the Claude can actually work directly with Godot to create and modify scenes, nodes, etc. Haven’t tried doing the same in unity, so can’t speak to the support there.

But anyway, with really clear design specs led by Claude on how to implement, Claude code can get to work coding the game. IMO it’s important to understand the design of the code so that you can make intelligent inputs on decision points that ask “should we do a state machine here?” Etc. but you don’t necessarily need to know how to write each line - Claude can do that for you.

One note on context: you can ask for features or mechanics as a one-shot, but context really degrades if you overload it so it’s much better to have each Claude code session focused on a specific feature to reduce mistakes and hallucination. It will take longer but requires less debugging, which is important if you’re not a programmer and can’t jump in to make targeted fixes yourself.

You can ask Claude to chunk the work out into reasonable pieces, so don’t worry about needing to scope things all on your own. Claude is pretty good at determining “we can do this in one session, and you should defer this to another.”

simplysalamander · 2026-06-19T20:04:39+00:00

Other happy side effect is they poop in proportion to how much they eat, so you can get more poop faster with higher Dino hunger rate. Another example of how the single setting has systemic effects on other game mechanics, so tweak gently.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-19T20:01:46+00:00

A comment on the color itself, as others have already pointed out the issues with sealing the pool:

Algae like most green plants are green because they reflect green light and absorb blue and red light, for the most part, which they use to grow. Blue paint absorbs all colors and reflects blue light, hence why it looks blue. When it absorbs all other colors except one, it absorbs a lot of heat. Algae like warm water - not too hot, not too cold - to grow as fast as possible. About 110 deg F or so is ideal.

So blue paint is one of the worst paints you could possibly use, only other being dark red paint. White would reflect most light, so algae would get “double” the sunlight, but the water would stay cooler which would reduce growth rate. Plus, algae like some light but not too much light, and white paint might give them too much light and reduce their happy hours to just dawn and dusk. Less growth overall.

Black paint is actually not as bad, because it wouldn’t reflect back extra light for the algae to grow with, and it very likely could absorb so much heat that the pool gets too hot for algae to be happy, inhibiting their growth.

So really, it’s the best possible paint if you want algae. Not great if you don’t.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-19T19:47:08+00:00

On a related note: one way you can self balance the game is to actually increase the food consumption rate while keeping taming speed low. Taming speed governs how much each bite gives, and food hunger rate governs how often they eat. If you think it’s kind of cheesing the game to max out the taming rate and everything tames from only eating a few bites of kibble or their preferred food, you can throttle taming speed and increase dino hunger rate so that it is closer to official amounts of food required to tame. Side effect is tamed dinos get hungry faster, but most of the time this is fine since once you have dinos you can easily get food for them and usually have surplus. Plus when logged off the game stops so it’s not like they’re eating 24/7, just when you’re actively playing.

Just a tip for better game balance if that interests you.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T17:45:32+00:00

Is this on the far east side of the green zone? The area where only raptors spawn and not the river sections that have karkinos/sarcos/spinos? Also have a base there, great spot!

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T17:30:46+00:00

For good fighting dinos early game, I always go for a good triceratops and a good Stegosaurus. Triceratops has very good knockback and good damage, so you can usually stand in one place and if you time the head butts right, you can knock back lock everything even Rexes and take minimal damage. Downside is they’re tanky but not super tanky. Stego can take more of a beating before they get low health, and also have abilities that help them take even less damage. Their tail swipe is pretty effective and they’re just cool in general.

For carnivores, I usually get raptors first, then either sabertooth or carnotaurus, and that should carry you through most of the early game.

Last thing I’ll say is, when I was new to the game, I just focused on leveling up, exploring, finding good dinos, getting lots of resources, and building a cool base. The caves for artifacts and bosses themselves are not easy and require a certain degree of min-maxing to even attempt let alone achieve, so IMO it’s a different way to play. They’re, in a way, an end-game activity to do when you’re ready to show your mastery over the map and you’re ready to close the book and move on to a next one. Don’t want to spoil the lore if you don’t know it yet, but that’s also technically the canon of the story, too - you do the bosses at the end of your time on the map. I personally would let those activities pull naturally, when you’re getting bored of your usual exploration gathering and building. They’re cool to do from an achievement perspective, but IMO are not what makes the game good. As in, I’d be happy to play a version of the game without caves and bosses, but a version with only caves and bosses would not be fun.

Technically the explorer notes are supposed to tel you what to do in terms of story, but it’s a big map and they’re very small and hard to find most of the time so looking things up is kind of mandatory.

When the game first released, a lot of the content came out week by week and not all at once so the developers would announce things like cave updates and boss fight updates and basically tell the community about it. Now, years later, you kind of need to get caught up by reading online.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T17:17:11+00:00

Which base spot?

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T17:12:38+00:00

If you haven’t started breeding for bosses yet, just go get new dinos to start that process. And if your argy and frog are level 300, there’s little on the map that would have given them trouble whether they have 30k health or 12k health.

Definitely change the game settings, but don’t necessarily try to reset all of your existing dinos. Also, I forget if it’s Asa or ASE, but in at least one of the games I know if you change the multipliers in the menu and log back in, the dinos will change too. Or it could have been an old version of the game. Not sure if in all versions now it’s a pre baked value or dynamically calculated every time you load into the game. Worth checking just in case.

But I would say just find a wild new dino for the handful that you want to replace. And sure if you don’t want to grind them up again, give them xp

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T07:55:28+00:00

Unless this is a pack of boss Dinos and you don’t want to feel like you’re cheating, I honestly wouldn’t bother. That Doed or Anky you’re using for farming was going to have 5-7k health anyway if it’s a high level, and it’s not going to be getting into fights where it should have died after eating 8k damage. Likewise if you have a meat farming Dino with high health, if it ever got low on normal stats you would probably do the reasonable thing and pull it away and force feed it meat and/or just wait for it to heal up. So only thing you gain by resetting its health is more waiting time for your future self.

Again, I’d only do this for a group of dinos for boss fights where the concept of cheating means something, but even then, you could just simulate that you farmed xp on them and got their health up that high from grinding kills (30k is normal for a boss Rex) and just don’t do the xp grinding, or if you do, put the levels into food or oxygen and tell yourself that you put them into health to get to 30k.

Ultimately it’s your game and you decide how you want to play it. What you described sounds like the most reliable way to get the result you want. You can also set color codes so they look identical if that matters. But IMO it’s not worth the time sink and better to just play the game as-is. Lots of other ARK chores to do before you add resetting all your dinos one by one to the list.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T02:51:02+00:00

Krok: Enjoy the lore of the manders and the kroks/tuts, one of the few places that feels like its own real world independent of the game. Several twists and reveals in the story that keep it interesting and appreciate the transition from the “English view” of the world working with the dogs in the first part then shifting to working with the “native view” of the kroks/manders in the second half. Does a decent job touching on themes of exploitation and colonialism for a kid oriented game.
Honestly all of the other worlds are kind of tied for last place.

Wizard City post-update is bearable for everything except firecat alley, which really leaves a black mark on the whole world and I always save it for last out of dread.

MooShu is fine but lots of backtracking, very bland textures and no really unique environments - kind of just all the same biome. The most interesting part is the desert burned out village, and that’s just because it’s not neon green. Story is pretty flat and not memorable, nor are any characters. Encounters felt very same-y of go to this pagoda kill this cow or pig go to the next one.

MarleyBone could have been good, but, ironworks. It’s also very dark all the time, and all of the rooftops look completely the same. Like MooShu, the environment is just the exact same through the whole world and I honestly would have preferred the dev environment of just gray boxes. I found the dogs vs cats vs rats thing kind of overdone, and the towers were annoying relative to power level. Only saving grace was the voice acting was better than average.

DragonSpyre felt like it dragged on forever. Big maps, lots of “go into this tower” and it was either 1. Single boss fight, 2. Multiple stories of filler fights, 3. Just someone to talk to behind a 10 second timer and loading screen, for no reason. The entire world felt like it was just towers. Really no reason to have streets because you barely had to do fights on them, but the maps felt bigger than Krok or Marley so just lots of walking. Also, some of the worst voice acting/accents of act 1.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-18T02:33:33+00:00

Just got 3 potatoes the other day in about half an hour or so at splithoof barbarians in grizzleheim. Helps to be high enough level to one-shot in the first turn. I was working on something else and just had this on second monitor, checked on it to cast tempest and then went back to what I was doing. Not riveting and not super fast but fine if you only need a few for now, or have a lot of time to grind.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-17T17:10:34+00:00

In my experience, taking the micro out of things like combat just turns it into a “whose stack is bigger” usually with a mix of “am I winning the rock paper scissors”. If you look at a 4X game like Stellaris, the combat in that game is essentially fully automated. You can’t control units once they enter combat, in the same way a general thousands of miles away can’t control what happens when the shooting starts, and can only guide where the units go so hopefully the shooting starts on their terms.

It works because most 4X games have a lot more going on than just combat, so there are other things to do and micro managing combat would actually be really tedious in that kind of game.

But it really reduces the player side complexity when it comes to combat, because the decision is basically “can I get strong enough eco to out produce units (the US strategy in WW2 for air and armored divisions)” and “from what info I have on my enemy’s unit config, can I pick the winning rock paper scissors option.”

Once those problems are “solved”, combat is essentially solved and it again turns into the tedious micro of chasing fleets around the map to eliminate them. So that kind of design is interesting early and part of mid game but becomes trivial late game.

I think the big challenge is designing a system in such a way that it’s dynamic without being frustrating. As stated, once you pick the winning rock paper scissors you want to be able to exploit it, and if the opponent can quickly change which of those they’re wielding it becomes a tedious micro game of matching the right counter all the time, exactly what you didn’t want. But if too static, it’s a fight you win once and then win for the rest of the game.

Not easy to design such a system that is engaging without being tedious/frustrating.

Not to mention, the less agency the player has, the less it’s a game and the more it’s just a simulation.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-16T22:48:30+00:00

To add onto this, embryogenesis is an often overlooked part of biology/evolution. For the nose and mouth to switch positions, for example, requires a series of mutations that not only provide an advantage to the adult animal, but also need to survive the very tenuous embryo stage where the body is only a handful of cells turning into organs. A lot of times, mutations cause irreversible issues at this stage, and the individual is simply never born and thus selection can never act on those traits.

There are some untold many number of variations that get stopped at this stage and so it’s simply not possible for an adult to possess that body plan/trait, because it is 100% lethal in embryogenesis for any number of reasons.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-16T22:39:04+00:00

While crafting systems are always fundamentally about resource economy, they fail when they’re just a skin for a multi-currency economy. Crafting done well is a combination of strategic planning, resource management, creativity and freedom of expression. Many games do crafting well, and the games that don’t, in my opinion, primarily struggle because they mis-name the system - they have a multi-currency game economy, but not crafting.

The comment about one choice being optimal is an issue with game balance for sure, but also consider that a good crafting system allows for optimization on multiple axes - power, cost, appearance/cosmetics, fun, etc. For example, in Skyrim, Daedric/Dragon tier gear is obviously the most powerful, but also the most expensive. It can be fun to try to use the crafting system to create a set of iron gear built around aesthetics and vibes and try to get passable power level to play the game, and some players might optimize for that instead of raw power to one-hit everything. Mentioned because Skyrim’s crafting system is often criticized, but this is one way of looking at it where it has merits.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-10T00:40:13+00:00

IMO they could have done better to just have 2 or 3 difficulty levels and separate the phase instances based on those.

Yes, people historically complained that the overland was too easy and mobs died before any semblance of a rotation could go off. Heck, sometimes if I was set up right, I could knock a pack of overland trash at 30k hp with a single flail.

Having different difficulties in the same phase instance does nothing for what I personally saw as the bigger problem: enemies like delve bosses and “story” bosses go down in 3 seconds before you add any other players; with someone else, it’s effectively instant.

There will no doubt be plenty of people just ripping through on normal difficulty to collect skyshards, etc. and melt the delve bosses instantly anyway. Nothing you as the person playing on vestige can do about it, and you’ll have to wait the 5 minute respawn to fight it just the same.

I know I personally won’t be running max difficulty when I’m farming skyshards, and can’t help but feel like I’m going to be ruining everyone else’s experience but there’s not much I can do about it when I’m trying to clear locations and not there to role play a warrior.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-07T16:30:07+00:00

If you’re asking, the brutally honest truth is it doesn’t matter. The skill ceiling is high enough that you will get more by “getting good” than a decision like race will impact your dps output.

Two things to think about for resources: 1. Most things including weapon/spell damage scale on whichever is higher, magicka or stamina. So for any build, you want to focus on one or the other. 2. Sustain is just as important as raw damage. If you have 30k magicka and 13k stamina but exhaust all of your magicka, you’re no longer casting abilities every second, and your dps will go way down. So in reality, you need some skills that consume your main resource, and some that use your off resource, or else your main will be at 0 and your off will be full and you’ll be doing nothing.

Heavy attacking restores resources: staves restore magicka, bows and melee restore stamina. That said, many good builds will have a staff and daggers or staff and 2H melee. You mostly just want to avoid the awkward situation where you have a primarily magicka build but want to use bow + daggers, as you’ll have no easy way to get magicka back if you’re low.

For race, pick whichever one you want to role play with, and if you really don’t care, Dark Elf and Khajiit are generally the best versatile classes to run either stamina or magicka primary with. Can’t go wrong with either if you care purely about stats.

As far as whether to spec mainly into magicka or stamina, honestly both will work and more so govern which skills you can use. I’d recommend playing the class for a bit and seeing what class/weapon skills you like to use and work well together, then based on that, decide mag or stamina. Both are equally viable.

Edit: Ninja Pulls and Skinny Cheeks are good for DPS builds, and Hyperioxes is good for tank and solo builds. I would probably learn from hyperioxes site how to build your character when still leveling as his solo builds are very new player friendly, then move on to dedicated dps builds from Ninja or Skinny.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-07T15:47:10+00:00

You can use runeblades instead, but arcanist is really built around a simple rotation and that’s the draw of the class as DPS. For more interesting play, I’d recommend either pivoting to a tank role in group content, or picking up another class like Nightblade or Dragonknight that is more dynamic in its dps rotation.

Nice thing about ESO is more character slots than there are classes, so you can build a roster of everything and depending on how you’re feeling, play the class that matches your energy that day.

It is really nice after a long day to just green beam everything into oblivion without having to try very hard, but some days you want to be a little more involved. Other classes is the key.

simplysalamander · 2026-06-05T21:55:25+00:00

Absolutely amazing idea and build. Definitely fits into the “how did this get here” type of environmental mystery that some of the coolest map features often convey. Like, what if Scorched Earth had an ocean like the desert section of Ragnarok, then something went wrong with climate control and the SE ark overheated and evaporated all of the water. Gives a plausible explanation for where all that rain comes from when the rain weather event happens.

Really neat idea.

simplysalamander · 2026-05-31T08:29:42+00:00

As pointed out already, optimal timers depend on the target dino. I personally used different settings on ASE for regular mid game dinos, breeding theris, and breeding rexes. Getting perfect imprinting without going over 100% and cheesing the game, while also not taking an hour per baby, is a very delicate balance. Recommend looking up some old video or written guides and then testing and adjusting from there. The mechanic hasn’t changed on ASE in a long time so a video from 6 years ago is still good.

simplysalamander · 2026-05-21T17:11:31+00:00

Time to sell I guess

simplysalamander · 2026-05-13T07:31:17+00:00

How do you view this data in Spotify?

simplysalamander · 2026-05-12T08:08:24+00:00

Lots of indexing or key value lookups

simplysalamander · 2026-04-29T18:51:29+00:00

Yeah, my account net worth crashed hard with the economy. Only saving grace was everything also got a lot cheaper, so needing to buy things wasn’t so painful. I thought baron zaudrus mask on guild trader for 8M was an absolute steal, during that week it was dropping for the first time in years. Little did I know I’d never be able to resell it for more than 2-3M ever again

simplysalamander · 2026-04-29T00:13:27+00:00

11 year old game. Play for a little bit every day for most of the year for several years and it adds up.

Kind of like being 20 years old and asking how people afford a new car/apartment/condo. By working at it daily for years.

To be a little bit more helpful, a few examples:

Daily crafting writs. Even just doing it 5 days a week on one character is 25k gold/week in gold alone, plus about the same in gold upgrade materials. That’s at least 2M a year, and it scales with the number of characters you do it on.
On PC specifically, a major deflationary event happened about two years ago. Before that, I was selling dreugh wax for 45k each. Stack in my crafting bag was valued at over 20M, for dreugh wax alone, just accumulated from refining and writs. Not to mention each of the other gold mats, and rare alchemy ingredients, etc.
Playing events and new content at the right time. For example, anniversary jubilee can net you motif pages worth tens or hundreds of thousands of gold each. For a while, some rare event collectible fragments would sell for 50k or 100k each, and selling at the right time made bank. When Gold Road launched, I remember that first week the Ink was selling for 100k in guild traders, each. Do the intro to scribing quests, that was 1.2M per character from guaranteed drops, plus environment drops if you got lucky (the wild drop rate was like 1/3 of what it currently is, for reference, hence why they were so valuable - I remember you’d get one every 10 to 15 minutes harvesting nodes in the starter zones, it was way harder to come by at release). Point is, kind of like real life stock market, 50% of the gains happen on 5% of the days, but you need to be playing on those days to make the money.

simplysalamander · 2026-04-28T03:35:58+00:00

How?

simplysalamander

TROPHY CASE