Back into it.. with a little AI assist..
I’m back to working on some game dev, but sadly it won’t be for the IGT.
Basic Fun! still hasn’t made any contact with us developers, and the fate of the IGT store is still way up in the air until they make a decision. It’s sad because we have a lot of games ready to go for it, if they’d only let us publish them.
I’m beginning to think they just don’t care about it… or the customers who spent $1,000 on one of these. Sorry guys! If we had a way to get our games onto the store, we absolutely would. Your support was amazing, and we really appreciate every one of you.
Anyways, I’m back at the keyboard.
In the meantime, I’ve developed an entire integrated website for Dungeons & Dragons with all sorts of amazing tools! If you play, check out https://thedmstoolkit.com!
A lot of the tools are completely free—you just need to sign up for an account or sign in with your Patreon or Google account. There are also subscription-based AI tools that far outnumber the free ones. Since I have to pay for AI usage, that’s what the subscription helps cover. It’s coming along quite well, and we’ve already picked up a few subscribers!
After seeing a post on Facebook last week, getting into a few arguments defending a guy who chose to use AI for some game art, and then playing his game for a bit, it got me wanting to revisit some old projects.
One of my favorite games of all time is Best Fiends.
Not because of the story or anything—I just love the gameplay.
For those who haven’t played it, but have played Match-3 games, it’s similar… except it’s a drag-to-match game. You have your board full of pieces, you select one, then drag across neighboring matching pieces to connect as many as you can before releasing them.
Years ago, I started developing one called Ruby’s Rubies. Same drag-to-match style, but with a lot of extra mechanics that Best Fiends didn’t have that made mine even more fun. It was probably about 70% coded (minus the actual level design), and then… I moved on to something else.
It was really a project I built just to prove to myself that I could code something like that completely by hand. I did, so the goal was accomplished.
Well… it was also written in a really old version of Unity, with a bunch of assets and libraries that definitely do not want to play nicely with the latest versions anymore.
So what do I do?
Well, for The DM’s Toolkit, I built that almost exclusively with AI. Very little of it was actually hand-coded, and it taught me a lot—both what to do and what not to do when working with AI.
Then I thought… why not put it to work in Unity?
Unity has its own AI plan, but it gives you a little bit of usage and then absolutely devours credits. I already pay about $100 a month for Claude, so I found a way to link my Claude subscription into Unity.
At first, I was just going to have it help fix my old code and update the outdated third-party libraries. Then I thought…
“What the hell… let’s just start over from scratch and have AI build it.”
So that’s exactly what I’m doing.
I’m probably editing around 25% of the code by hand, while Claude is writing the other 75%, and honestly it’s doing an amazing job. All of the graphics I’m using right now are from the old version—various assets I’ve drawn myself over the years, along with some third-party packs I’ve collected.
Now, as I wrap up for the night, I have a working game board. Pieces fall into place properly. Blocks, walls, cages, chains, collectible drops… even a built-in level editor.
It’s coming along quite nicely.
I still don’t know if I’ll actually publish this or not, but it’s been a lot of fun seeing it come together again.
One thing I keep seeing from a lot of indie devs online (especially on Facebook) is, “AI sucks. Your game sucks if you use AI. Using AI means you can’t do anything yourself.”
Bah.
It just feels like the latest trendy bandwagon to jump on: “I hate AI.”
Personally, why wouldn’t I use a tool that helps me accomplish my goals in a fraction of the time?
Sure, I can code everything by hand. I’ve been doing exactly that for over 20 years.
AI can do a lot of it too… and it can do it a whole lot faster.
It’s funny because this reminds me of when Unity and Unreal first started becoming popular. Back then it was, “If you use Unity, you suck. You can’t do it yourself.”
I’d already been doing it myself for years.
It took me a while to realize that Unity wasn’t replacing my skills—it was helping me create faster instead of making me build my own engine for the seventeenth time.
I see AI the same way. Besides in 10 years 90% of the games will be written with AI, because that’s just how it will be.. and not a single person will care. In 10 years someone will release a game with a note that NO AI was used and the world will go WOW! Look what he did! like its something new and special.. AI is a tool, it’s not going anywhere. Embrace it..
Anyways, I’m going to get back to work, finish a few more things tonight, and see where I end up.
But hey… I’m coding games again!
Whether they ever make it to the published world or not remains to be seen…
