FWIW, I’m a platform engineer who is actively mourning the loss of reliability and care given to production code. I just think games aren’t an area where this is nearly as much of an issue.

Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games.

Can I go back to the 80's please?

LLMs are really good at C# (and tscn files for some reason), so that solves the "LLMs suck at GDScript" problem. Also, C# can be cheaper in terms of token usage (even accounting for not having to load the additional APIs): one agent writes the interfaces, another one fills in the details.

Saying this because I had really enjoyed vibecoding a Godot game in C# - and it was REALLY painful to vibecode with GDScript.

I looked at the video, awful results, better start with a template.

I tried using Claude Code to build an RPG game with Godot and GDScript, using free to use assets: a total failure :/

The game was supposed to be many implementation steps long but I asked Claude to first produce a one area demo, so I could test the assets and choose the one I liked. First it produced some garbage using the assets randomly. Then it tried to copy from an existing demo but it had not idea where a door or a path were and at a certain point it even admitted it with something like: "I can't design an usable and nice area: I either make it functional and ugly or I copy and adapt the existing demo but I will have no clue about what is what"

I've never even attempted to develop games before so I'm sure I don't even know the basic concepts, but this use case definitely didn't work for me.

Maybe it could generate the code of the game if I provided the full design?

Something I’m surprised about is the lack of unit testing. Agents are remarkably good at creating tests and GUT testing is pretty well developed; having some good unit tests would really assist in the subsequent steps where you polish controls, add features, etc. Without these, I think things will get off the rails pretty quickly.

I had assumed with the complex mix of scripts and the scene graph in Godot wouldn't be a good fit (personally trying and failing to make games in it by hand in the past may have been a factor)

Perhaps I'll give this approach a go if inspiration strikes!

Claude’s the only one I’ve got working with GoDot.

Good work! Interesting to follow.

[1] https://tesana.ai/

He and I will give this a spin this weekend.

I think minimizing the amount of human effort in the loop is the wrong optimization, and it's the reason we end up with "slop".

It's the dream of a lot of people to have a magic box that makes you things you can sell, or enjoy for personal leisure. But LLMs are not the magic box. And there may not ever be a magic box. The sooner we can accept that the magic box isn't in the room with us, then the sooner we can start getting real utility out of LLMs.

TLDR: Human taste is more important than building things for the sake of building them.

Btw: Have you looked at Tripo3D models' topology? Is it still so bad that if you want to make small edits you have to retopologize the whole thing first?

FWIW as a disclaimer I'm making my own game not using AI since I value learning the skills myself, but I am interested to see how fast AI tools adopt to gamedev. For now they've been more of a false shortcut in anything else than prototyping and semantic search ("I need to achieve this visual effect, what algorithms should I look up").

The starting points of Three.js examples are more of a game than anything here.

Stop saying AI is building games when it can’t even build a standard web page to match a mockup.

I feel like this could be a real positive thing if you had spent some effort writing about how and why this is useful, and targeted this more for learning + artist assistance versus just generating a complete game. Gamers universally do not want more AI slop, but tools that artists and programmers could use to automate busywork or learn the engine would have been much better.

That being said, Claude does not structure the project in the way someone familiar with the engine would, and just like any 'real' software, if you don't guide it, the output quickly degenerates. For example, stuff that would normally, intuitively be a child item in a scene, Claude instead prefers to initialize in code for some reason. It does not seem to care about group labels, which is an extremely easy way to identify different (types of) objects that should be treated in the same way in certain cases.

The games in the video look like GameJam projects? I'm not good at Godot, and I could probably hack most of them together in a week or so. I imagine an actual game developer could put some of them together in days.

In order to have LLMs build something good with any framework, not just a game engine, you have to steer and curate the output, otherwise non-trivial projects become intractable past a certain point, and you have a mountain of bugs to sort through.

> The Training Data Scarcity: LLMs barely know GDScript.

I've not found this to be an issue. Claude does just fine when you explain what you want. I've never had it hallucinate stuff, and I've barely seen it look at docs. Granted, I've only had it write 1-2k lines of GDScript, but I've never felt like it was spouting complete nonsense.

> To fix this, I built a custom reference system: a hand-written language spec, full API docs converted from Godot's XML source, and a quirks database for engine behaviors you can't learn from docs alone.

This is the point where I feel like this is nonsense (more than what the LLM-written prose would imply). Maybe this is my inexperience talking, but I feel there is no way that this would be better in any way over any alternative. Especially if you just lazy-load stuff at runtime. Godot already has good docs. They should certainly cover much more than whatever you need to make the games you demonstrated. What is the point of making a duplicate version of the docs, when you have the docs right there? If you really think that Claude can't handle GDScript, you can just use C#?

> The Build-Time vs. Runtime State: Scenes are generated by headless scripts that build the node graph in memory and serialize it to .tscn files. This avoids the fragility of hand-editing Godot's serialization format.

Again, maybe that's my inexperience with Godot, but I have no idea what you're talking about here? When you run, you do get a different node tree (and 'state' I guess?) but where does "hand-editing Godot's serialization format" come into this? Why would you ever need to concern yourself with what Godot does to transform your code after you've written it?

> It catches the visual bugs text analysis misses: z-fighting, floating objects, physics explosions, and grid-like placements that should be organic.

Funnily enough, those are all stuff that text analysis should be better at finding. I personally use logs & actually playing the game.

Nice set of prompts and skills tho, im grabbing them for personal use.

If I'm not mistake how Claude Code or AI agent work, they need everything in 'context' and few tricks to reduce the context size. Sure, but given the number of files you have, how much of the context is consumed by all those claude files vs actual user input?