15 ms·

Show HN: Claude Code skills that build complete Godot games

337 points by htdt 7mo ago

I’ve been working on this for about a year through four major rewrites. Godogen is a pipeline that takes a text prompt, designs the architecture, generates 2D/3D assets, writes the GDScript, and tests it visually. The output is a complete, playable Godot 4 project. Getting LLMs to reliably generate functional games required solving three specific engineering bottlenecks: 1. The Training Data Scarcity: LLMs barely know GDScript. It has ~850 classes and a Python-like syntax that will happily let a model hallucinate Python idioms that fail to compile. 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. Because 850 classes blow up the context window, the agent lazy-loads only the specific APIs it needs at runtime. 2. 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. But it means certain engine features (like `@onready` or signal connections) aren't available at build time—they only exist when the game actually runs. Teaching the model which APIs are available at which phase — and that every node needs its owner set correctly or it silently vanishes on save — took careful prompting but paid off. 3. The Evaluation Loop: A coding agent is inherently biased toward its own output. To stop it from cheating, a separate Gemini Flash agent acts as visual QA. It sees only the rendered screenshots from the running engine—no code—and compares them against a generated reference image. It catches the visual bugs text analysis misses: z-fighting, floating objects, physics explosions, and grid-like placements that should be organic. Architecturally, it runs as two Claude Code skills: an orchestrator that plans the pipeline, and a task executor that implements each piece in a `context: fork` window so mistakes and state don't accumulate. Everything is open source: https://github.com/htdt/godogen https://github.com/htdt/godogen Demo video (real games, not cherry-picked screenshots): https://youtu.be/eUz19GROIpY https://youtu.be/eUz19GROIpY Blog post with the full story (all the wrong turns) coming soon. Happy to answer questions.

RomanPushkin 7mo ago
Upvoting this! And thanks!
bhu8 7mo ago
Great work but why not use C# instead of GDScript? 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.
- htdt 7mo ago
  Good point, I haven't tried C# yet and will after this comment. The original reasoning: GDScript is the default path in Godot, nearly all docs and community examples use it, and the engine integration is tighter (signals, exports, scene tree). C# still has some gaps — no web export, no GDExtension bindings. But you're right that from the LLM side, C# flips the core problem. Strong training data, static typing for better compiler feedback, interfaces for clean architecture. The context window savings from not loading a custom language spec could be significant. Main thing I'd want to test is whether headless scene building — the core of the pipeline — works as smoothly in C#. Going to experiment with this.
  - andai 7mo ago
    Don't all of these advantages also apply to humans? :) This always puzzled me about Godot. I like Python as much as the next guy (afaik GDScript is a quite similar language), but for anything with a lot of moving parts, wouldn't you prefer to use static typing? And even simple games have a lot of moving parts!
    - saint_yossarian 7mo ago
      GDScript has static type hints now, it's still a bit basic but continually getting better.
      - __loam 7mo ago
        Yeah people groan about GDScript but the performance code in the engine is written in c++. Since they added static typing, GDScript is perfectly adequate as a scripting language
lemming 7mo ago
This actually produces more impressive results than I expected. My understanding was that models are quite poor at spatial reasoning/understanding, so I'm surprised it can generate such good assets. Do you use different models for the 3d generation?
- htdt 7mo ago
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- salvo10f 7mo ago
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takahitoyoneda 7mo ago
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tyleo 7mo ago
What is the development loop like with this? There’s a lot of folks successfully building games with agents already on the AI gamedev Discord server. So I’m wondering if there were some shorter paths to your goal. You might want to exchange notes with folks there.
- htdt 7mo ago
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chaosprint 7mo ago
Interesting. But if you claim "prompt in Godot game out", how do you deal with assets? I think assets pipeline is one of the most challenging parts in game dev. Is there anything similar but for Bevy?
- htdt 7mo ago
  Assets are a big chunk of the pipeline — generates 2D art with Gemini, converts to 3D via Tripo3D, handles sprite sheets and background removal. Animation is the main remaining gap. Haven't looked into Bevy but will check it out, thanks.
  - tayo42 7mo ago
    What handles making sprite sheets?
    - htdt 7mo ago
      Gemini with some tricks for grid alignment and background removal. Not perfect yet, planning to switch to a video model for animated sprites.
      - tayo42 7mo ago
        Are they not animated?
        htdt 7mo ago
        They are for 2D — classic animated sprite sheets with numbered frames. 3D models are static for now. The video model switch should help with smoother 2D animation between frames.
vblanco 7mo ago
There is not much need for this. I already use claude code with godot to build serious projects, and you only need to point the bot at godot + sourcecode folder, and use C#, then it works like a charm. Nice set of prompts and skills tho, im grabbing them for personal use.
- tpxl 7mo ago
  Can you expand on how you do this? I've gotten into gamedev a couple of times, but never got around to completing anything. Something like this might just do the trick.
  - vblanco 7mo ago
    First of all, you dont do one prompt to do the entire game, but "decent" style vibecoding where you do things little by little controlling the bot. Godot whole engine is text based. This means you can just let claude rip through the assets and files just fine. It basically just works. The thing that is critical is to make some documentation about the axis systems and core classes (the one on OP project is pretty good, ive grabbed it) and then you set your claude.md to point at the godot source code so that the bot can doublecheck things. Ive been playing with multiple engines, and godot is by far the best one to use with the AI. Unreal engine is too heavy on binary files that coding tools cant parse, and Unity is closed source which leaves the bot with no reliable documentation or way to check what the game apis are doing. Godot is small enough that the bot can understand it and works fine for games that arent too complicated. Im using it to build a spiritual remake of daggerfall as a procedural open world rpg, right now its at 60.000 lines of code, quite advanced. I got it running on a steamdeck at 60 fps even with 4 kilometers of draw distance with thousands of trees and procedural terrain thanks to doing tons of custom shaders and a few engine edits.
    - mattfrommars 7mo ago
      incredible. And this was all using $20 plan from Claude or do you pay extra for Claude bandwidth?
hmokiguess 7mo ago
I saw the demo video, in all honesty, they felt really lifeless to me. The snowboard one was the one that most caught my attention but then the mechanics, and movements of the character, made it seem like it's really bad physics. Do you have a published game I could try rather than these demos? I'm curious
- htdt 7mo ago
  Fair point, these demos are essentially raw single-run output, not cherry-picked or polished. The goal was showing the pipeline works end-to-end, not producing a finished game. I'm planning to do a proper full game with more iteration and publish it as a playable build, not just a video. That should give a much better sense of actual quality ceiling.
  - bgirard 7mo ago
    I'd love to see the results of that. I think calling a single prompt iteration lifeless misses the point. It's like looking at a game that has had a few hours of development and saying it's bad. Games need iterations. Seeing your results as the first iteration is impressive. I can see follow-up prompts and custom tweaking get really good results! Last summer I built a factorio-like automation game with older models and over time the game really started to take life.
  - lexicality 7mo ago
    Were those three games the best results you got? Only the bike one appeared to have an actual ... game to it. The "Racing game" appeared to be a car following a set path with a freecam and there didn't seem to be any gameplay mechanics in the snowboarding one, just a physics entity wildly crashing down a hill with no consequences or score.
    - deleted 7mo ago
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    - johncormick 7mo ago
      The year is 2050 and those are all AAA games.
andreagrandi 7mo ago
Context: I've been using agents (both Claude Code and Codex) for my daily work and for personal projects, but always in domains where I had some knowledge and I'm currently happy with them. 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?
- htdt 7mo ago
  That's exactly the failure mode this project exists to solve. The core issue is Claude Code has no way to see what it's producing — code compiles fine but assets are floating, paths lead nowhere, layouts are garbage. It even told you as much. Godogen closes that loop: after writing code, it captures screenshots from the running engine and a vision model evaluates them. That's the difference between "compiles but broken" and "actually playable." And yes — providing design docs helps a lot. The pipeline generates those automatically (visual reference, architecture, task plan), but you can provide your own and customize the skills to match your vision.
  - dr_kiszonka 7mo ago
    It would be a hit, if you packaged that loop as an MCP. Opus can make really pretty 3d models even using three.js primitives but they tend to have serious issues (like facial features inside the head). Being able to have it automatically generate a set of screenshots and Gemini scrutinize them and provide structured feedback would be a time saver. Curiously, I could not get Gemini 3.1 Pro to ever generate anything even remotely passable.
guitarlimeo 7mo ago
Nice work, must have been a pain to get Godot's formats working with Claude. As another commenter suggested the demo videos don't do any justice to this project - yeah it's the magic that you can generate playable (wouldn't say complete myself) games with a single prompt, but the quality of those is exactly why people are so put off by AI slop. If this was a better harness that acted more like a tool I think it would be seen as more useful. 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").
- htdt 7mo ago
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twelvevaginas 7mo ago
“Real games” the most incomplete bullshit you ever saw passed off as a game. 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.
- htdt 7mo ago
  That was actually my starting point — generating Three.js output that looked okay-ish but broke the moment you touched anything. Godot gives you a real engine with physics, scene trees, which is why the output is more robust even if it's far from polished.
mattfrommars 7mo ago
This is incredible piece of work. I was looking into .claude folder and skim reading it. One thing stood out to me how large it is. 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?
- htdt 7mo ago
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- parasti 7mo ago
  This is entirely based on the "agent skills" system. LLM agent only sees the one-line skill description in its context and "lazy loads" the rest of the skill file on demand.
  - jwelten 7mo ago
    The lazy loading approach is smart. We've been publishing agent skills too and the context budget is a real constraint; six skills with reference docs would blow past 30k tokens if loaded eagerly. Filtering at load time based on what the agent actually needs makes a huge difference. Curious if the orchestrator/executor split causes issues with state handoff between the two context forks.
rybosworld 7mo ago
I think this is a cool tech demo. But the commonality I see in all of these "let the agent run free" harnesses is that the output is never something I would want to use/watch/play. 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.
- prawn 7mo ago
  Maybe OP could try an angle where at various points, the process presents the user with 2-6 options, and they choose their favourite. With a bit of intentional chaos in there, the user and tool could potentially discover interesting game concepts and eventually build them as prototypes.
avaer 7mo ago
How does this stack up against something like Tesana [1], which is also Godot based? Would it be accurate to say that it's like "Tesana but local"? [1] https://tesana.ai/ https://tesana.ai/
- EagnaIonat 7mo ago
  That site looks like this generations Flash player.
- guitarlimeo 7mo ago
  A bit misleading marketing there (like always) - all the good looking game videos are actually just AI generated videos (obvious tells: HUD elements wouldn't have scrambled text if they were actual games, rendering of barrels has the worst LOD popout I've ever seen or it's AI), but the actual games are really bad.
samiv 7mo ago
A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games. Can I go back to the 80's please?
- krapp 7mo ago
  >A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. There are still... dozens of us left!
- htdt 7mo ago
  Bold of you to assume I'm not making this with passion, I've been yelling at LLMs for a year straight, that's basically the 80s experience with better coffee
  - krapp 7mo ago
    The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.
    - ianbutler 7mo ago
      The majority of all code written is highly mediocre. Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it. Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
      - krapp 7mo ago
        >Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming. A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.
slopinthebag 7mo ago
Everything about this feels like AI slop, including the post which is very clearly AI written. I'm sorry but if you aren't even willing to put any effort into writing a post showcasing what you have worked on what is the point of anybody taking a serious look? And the tools are clearly AI generated as well, I can even tell where you used Gemini in some places because you left in it's distinctive comments. Not to mention the showcase games are meme-tier. 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.
- htdt 7mo ago
  Fair enough on the writing, I do use LLMs heavily, including for writing. That's what made a solo project of this scope possible at all alongside a full-time job. The generated skill files aren't meant to be human-readable, they're machine instructions. On the 'tool vs generator' framing — I think both matter. Assisted tooling is the obvious win, but full autonomy unlocks different use cases entirely. Curious where we'll end up.
stephc_int13 7mo ago
Gamedev here. I looked at the video, awful results, better start with a template.
- empressplay 7mo ago
  Yeah exactly, build a library of a hundred or so stock game templates and just let the model configure / modify them as needed. Would cover most use cases.
- Closi 7mo ago
  I wouldn't feel that smug considering these are single prompt generations on a pretty small project. As Two Minute Paper's always says, it's not just about what this looks like at the moment, it's about what this might look like another three breakthroughs down the line. While you can't guarantee further breakthroughs, at the rate of advancement and pace of improvement, you would have to be brave to bet on no further breakthroughs.
  - stephc_int13 7mo ago
    I will happily re-evaluate on the next breakthrough, but for now, for an aspiring gamedev, this is likely a waste of time. Models can be used more efficiently, at the moment, but you have to understand what you are doing, and not trying to one-shot anything.
    - popcorncowboy 7mo ago
      I agree with you, but I think it skips over the fundamental point of the demo - that this is possible at all. The door is unlocked. I expect where commercial interests will take this over the next year or two, even without further "model breakthroughs" will be enough to change how many devs engage in game development. Well done htdt.
  - dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
    And a few more breakthroughs after that it might look like sticks and stones ... who knows!
leontloveless 7mo ago
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c0m47053 7mo ago
Very interesting. Have to admit, I assumed Godot was just out of the realm of agentic dev. I decided to actually build a game a few months ago, and went with Raylib (with C#), and it worked out pretty well (https://github.com/alexwlsnr/neo-arena https://github.com/alexwlsnr/neo-arena) 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!
- fxwin 7mo ago
  fyi that link is dead, maybe the repo is set to private?
- justinhj 7mo ago
  for what it's worth I have been building a game with godot and using gemini flash and pro to help. it has no trouble editing gd script and scenes. so far it hasn't failed in anything i asked it to do
_QrE 7mo ago
Anecdotal, but I have used Claude to help me write sections of games that I'm (sometimes) working on in Godot fairly recently (Opus 4.5 iirc). It's been very helpful, and it's been very easy to guide it to do this. It came up with approaches of calculating targeting and movement that I would not have thought of myself. 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.
soared 7mo ago
This will do poorly with the HN crowd because they can write or understand code. This is an incredible tool for TikTok/nontechnical people who don’t know anything about ai, and want to see their random idea turned into a game. Really cool!
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  I agree, it will be a boon to other content creators on YouTube: "The #1 Way to Make $181,020 A Month With Games -- Join My Skool"
Underphil 7mo ago
There's understandably a lot of negativity in here, myself included. But isn't this at least good to create a "jumping off" point for building a game? The demos might be shit but using them to create a basis for an idea seems like it could remove a lot of the headaches of prototyping and early-stage burnout.
- deleted 7mo ago
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eudamoniac 7mo ago
I can't decide if this is impressive or not. At first I think it is, but also the best demos you could find were not good games, and likely not even good bases for further iteration. It seems pretty likely that this tool would increase the speed of shipping a salable game by zero minutes. So it's kind of impressive but at the same time not.
- tartoran 7mo ago
  If you put in the effort to polish the scenes, mechanics, and overall feel, then with a great idea and a few iterations, you could potentially build a sellable game. I honestly do not know what it takes to sell a game, but if you have a strong idea and want to put it online, a tool like this can take you surprisingly far and let you focus on the bigger-picture parts of the game. I think it's quite impressive without even trying it. I think more and more tools like this will pop up soon.
  - eudamoniac 7mo ago
    Well no, what I mean is I've used Godot a lot and I think it's likely that the effort to polish this output is more than the effort to start from scratch. Godot as a codebase is very easy to become horrendous spaghetti. Even though this is some form of a start, I kind of doubt it would decrease time to ship by any amount, maybe even increase time to ship, for the same reasons that greenfielding is faster and easier than incrementally refactoring a legacy clusterfuck written by juniors.
    - tartoran 7mo ago
      You may be right, I don't have any experience with Godot but as a noob game dev it feels to me that if I have a good clear idea (perhaps a simple one), a Claude skills pipeline would help move things faster, get to something roughly working relatively easily. From there to a polished game there's considerable effort, I'm sure. Since I've had a pretty good experience with LLMs and making Lua games my inclination is to think this would propel me quite well with Godot as well. What do I know...
Madmallard 7mo ago
"real games"
aed 7mo ago
Woah! This is very timely. My 9-year-old has been playing around with Claude Code and creating games, mostly with Phaser. He's dabbling with some 3D games and I was just looking at Godot as an option yesterday. He and I will give this a spin this weekend.
stevefan1999 7mo ago
This thing is spot on for me as I'm evaluating trying to build games in Godot using Claude Code, but in C# (I have hacks to make it run on NativeAOT), but the result is...mixed. I see only GDScript option is available and that's kinda sad.
weakfish 7mo ago
I think the software engineer types in this thread misunderstand what makes game developers tick. A lot of people here do game dev as a way to explore new ways to code. My sister is an indie dev and to her, code is an unavoidable means to an end (creating a game). So many games are absolutely spaghetti on the inside because the creator is deeply uninterested in the art of code. So to that end, LLMs are actually an awesome thing to enable creators to experiment more freely. 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.
- socalgal2 7mo ago
  There are many great games absolutely full of attrocious code.
  - djfdat 7mo ago
    I'd wager that there are no great games without some amount of atrocious code.
- azney 7mo ago
  Yes, in fact there is a ridiculous amount of people in software that want to gatekeep how others do things. In the context of making a personal project it will never ever matter whether you know how to code or not as long as you enjoyed the process. It probably stems from a place of fear and pride.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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- cure_42 7mo ago
  This doesn't just generate the code though. It generates the "art" and everything else as well. Ideas are beyond cheap. It's the personal creativity that makes games good or bad. And saying the code doesn't matter is just ignorant. In plenty of great games the art doesn't matter. In plenty of others the code doesn't matter. Or the dialogue. But the reverse is just as true. In a game with tight, fluid player controls, the code to make that happen takes just as much creativity and skill and human touch as any other form of art. A driving sim made by someone deeply uninterested in the code they write will never feel good to play. It is just so disingenuous to say that people who focus more on the code side of game development aren't creators. If I can make a demo with a black rectangle jumping around on some red rectangles and hand it to someone and have them say it feels like they're jumping around as a cat, with no art or animations, I'd say that took creativity and a human touch that ai is nowhere near being able to emulate.
canadiantim 7mo ago
Very impressive! Looks great!
nanobuilds 7mo ago
Was expecting a higher jump for plumbers. Cashiers were already suffering with the self-checkouts for years.
sieep 7mo ago
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- eucyclos 7mo ago
  I say do what makes you happy and don't worry about people like ^this^ guy.
  - sieep 7mo ago
    I mean the title of the post claims it can create full games, it can't. Its not even close?
    - GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
      Full game here means it compiles and runs, not that it beats the charts.
- dang 7mo ago
  Personal attacks, which you crossed into here, are not allowed on HN. Please don't post like this, no matter how you feel about someone else or their work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
  - sieep 7mo ago
    Didn't you guys just make rules about using AI to comment and post? > Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. Maybe you need to read your own rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This guy is as blatant as it gets, and you can't/refuse to enforce it. Obvious AI writing with all the tells. Your site is going to crap buddy go select which rules you feel like moderating somewhere else and ban me. Never going on here again, enjoy your AI slop.
    - dang 7mo ago
scumblr 7mo ago
I think this is pretty cool, all things considered. I think it’s unrealistic to expect anything that’s been one-shot to have much polish or charm. 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.
- htdt 7mo ago
  Thanks! Good point on unit testing — I haven't gone in that direction yet honestly. The current approach is selective: the decomposer identifies genuinely hard elements (custom physics, procedural generation) and those get dedicated testing. Routine stuff like movement or UI doesn't, since the visual QA already catches most breakage there. Haven't hit real problems with code correctness so far, but I could see unit tests becoming more relevant as projects scale up. Worth experimenting with.
EagnaIonat 7mo ago
Claude codes fine in GoDot. You have to explicitly give it the version you are working on. Claude’s the only one I’ve got working with GoDot.
ryan14975 7mo ago
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bni 7mo ago
With games we just need some really good slop filters on the storefronts. I mean this has been the case already for some time even before AI
socalgal2 7mo ago
Here's Google's: https://www.youtube.com/playablesbuilder/ https://www.youtube.com/playablesbuilder/
SilentEditor 7mo ago
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termwatch 7mo ago
But can it build Doom?
- htdt 7mo ago
  Give it a couple of model upgrades :)
martinvalchev 7mo ago
The lazy-loading approach for the API reference is clever. Did you consider embedding a smaller, distilled subset of the most-used classes permanently in context, and only lazy-loading the long tail? Curious whether the overhead of deciding what to load ever causes cascading errors where the wrong API gets pulled in. Also interested in the visual QA separation - using a model that sees only screenshots and never the code is a genuinely good idea for avoiding confirmation bias. Did you try using Claude for that role too, or was Gemini Flash specifically chosen for cost reasons?
- htdt 7mo ago
  The two-tier loading is exactly that — ~128 common classes always visible as one-liners, full docs loaded on demand. The agent does sometimes pull the wrong class, but since each task runs in a forked context, a bad lookup doesn't cascade beyond that task. Gemini Flash for QA was a capability choice — it's able to catch spatial issues like z-fighting and clipping, which is not obvious since vision models aren't typically trained on broken game screenshots. Turned out to work surprisingly well.
Kachilu 7mo ago
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skwuwu 7mo ago
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gneuron 7mo ago
Hey bro, been working with the Godot MCP for about a year now myself. This is really cool! The two loops I think you should add / address: 3D assets / rigging. This is the hardest thing to do in the current Claude Code to Godot MCP loop right now. Claude can reliably make 3D assets using the in game creator, but ideally you have a system that works with external models (or better yet, generates them ala something like spline or similar system in Blender) and then can rig them up in game. 2. Expanding the evaluation loop from just screenshots to actually playing the game. I just started building a game in Claude Code Desktop, and the Claude agent there can actually PLAY the game. That's a huge unlock. I've been thinking about how to get this same functionality in the Godot MCP server but if your system can do it that would be awesome too.
techcam 7mo ago
Feels like we have great tooling for code, but prompts are still mostly trial-and-error. Curious how people are validating them today.
vunderba 7mo ago
The 2D sprites in the bike riding scene are a bit of a mess. Honestly consistent 2D animation is difficult. You've basically got two approaches right now - use a openpose style controlnet representing a walk cycle in conjunction with img2img OR you can try using a walk LoRA with WAN to generate video and then clip out 4-8 frames that represent a good loop from the video. https://imgpb.com/ELJfWpi https://imgpb.com/ELJfWpi
yagizdagabak 7mo ago
Awesome stuff, what does it use to generate the assets?
sacredSatan 7mo ago
Thanks for not cherry picking the output. The demos look great for a single prompt output. I can see myself playtesting a mechanic that I just thought of but would probably take longer to implement in my own WIP game etc. I think this has great value just now, can't wait for it to get better. Keep at it.
saltynews 7mo ago
As a Godot user, GDScript's unique syntax often trips up standard LLMs, so your custom language reference is a game changer. Integrating Claude Code directly into the game dev pipeline like this shows where the future of 'Agentic Workflow' is heading.
dahrkael 7mo ago
this is great, specially the evaluation loop. the worst part of using AI to make games is testing things work as intended after every modification specially if its a complex game. whats the art creation pipeline?
neilsharma425 7mo ago
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EigenFluxAI 7mo ago
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wslh 7mo ago
Amazing! We have played with it to create an animation based on "The Three Little Pigs". Video available here [1]. [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7XjhhlzIZ1br/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7Xjhhlz...
buyTheDip 7mo ago
Very cool. Thanks for sharing! This introduced me to Godot, gave me an excuse to use Claude code and a few hours later had it all installed and created my first game/simulation. Experimenting each night with a new game idea, genre, style, etc. Really fun. Thanks again!
4riel 7mo ago
I am not a game developer but a platform developer. The custom reference approach is spot on and that's a massive job. I compiled 202 tips from 10 'important' CC users into a repo and plugin. You might want to ask CC to review it and see if any of it is worth implementing in your skills as well: https://github.com/4riel/cc-bible https://github.com/4riel/cc-bible

337 points by htdt 7mo ago

RomanPushkin 7mo ago

Upvoting this! And thanks!

bhu8 7mo ago

Great work but why not use C# instead of GDScript? 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.

htdt 7mo ago
Good point, I haven't tried C# yet and will after this comment. The original reasoning: GDScript is the default path in Godot, nearly all docs and community examples use it, and the engine integration is tighter (signals, exports, scene tree). C# still has some gaps — no web export, no GDExtension bindings. But you're right that from the LLM side, C# flips the core problem. Strong training data, static typing for better compiler feedback, interfaces for clean architecture. The context window savings from not loading a custom language spec could be significant. Main thing I'd want to test is whether headless scene building — the core of the pipeline — works as smoothly in C#. Going to experiment with this.
- andai 7mo ago
  Don't all of these advantages also apply to humans? :) This always puzzled me about Godot. I like Python as much as the next guy (afaik GDScript is a quite similar language), but for anything with a lot of moving parts, wouldn't you prefer to use static typing? And even simple games have a lot of moving parts!
  - saint_yossarian 7mo ago
    GDScript has static type hints now, it's still a bit basic but continually getting better.
    - __loam 7mo ago
      Yeah people groan about GDScript but the performance code in the engine is written in c++. Since they added static typing, GDScript is perfectly adequate as a scripting language

lemming 7mo ago

This actually produces more impressive results than I expected. My understanding was that models are quite poor at spatial reasoning/understanding, so I'm surprised it can generate such good assets. Do you use different models for the 3d generation?

htdt 7mo ago
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salvo10f 7mo ago
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takahitoyoneda 7mo ago

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tyleo 7mo ago

What is the development loop like with this? There’s a lot of folks successfully building games with agents already on the AI gamedev Discord server. So I’m wondering if there were some shorter paths to your goal. You might want to exchange notes with folks there.

htdt 7mo ago
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chaosprint 7mo ago

Interesting. But if you claim "prompt in Godot game out", how do you deal with assets? I think assets pipeline is one of the most challenging parts in game dev. Is there anything similar but for Bevy?

htdt 7mo ago
Assets are a big chunk of the pipeline — generates 2D art with Gemini, converts to 3D via Tripo3D, handles sprite sheets and background removal. Animation is the main remaining gap. Haven't looked into Bevy but will check it out, thanks.
- tayo42 7mo ago
  What handles making sprite sheets?
  - htdt 7mo ago
    Gemini with some tricks for grid alignment and background removal. Not perfect yet, planning to switch to a video model for animated sprites.
    - tayo42 7mo ago
      Are they not animated?
      - htdt 7mo ago
        They are for 2D — classic animated sprite sheets with numbered frames. 3D models are static for now. The video model switch should help with smoother 2D animation between frames.

vblanco 7mo ago

There is not much need for this. I already use claude code with godot to build serious projects, and you only need to point the bot at godot + sourcecode folder, and use C#, then it works like a charm. Nice set of prompts and skills tho, im grabbing them for personal use.

tpxl 7mo ago
Can you expand on how you do this? I've gotten into gamedev a couple of times, but never got around to completing anything. Something like this might just do the trick.
- vblanco 7mo ago
  First of all, you dont do one prompt to do the entire game, but "decent" style vibecoding where you do things little by little controlling the bot. Godot whole engine is text based. This means you can just let claude rip through the assets and files just fine. It basically just works. The thing that is critical is to make some documentation about the axis systems and core classes (the one on OP project is pretty good, ive grabbed it) and then you set your claude.md to point at the godot source code so that the bot can doublecheck things. Ive been playing with multiple engines, and godot is by far the best one to use with the AI. Unreal engine is too heavy on binary files that coding tools cant parse, and Unity is closed source which leaves the bot with no reliable documentation or way to check what the game apis are doing. Godot is small enough that the bot can understand it and works fine for games that arent too complicated. Im using it to build a spiritual remake of daggerfall as a procedural open world rpg, right now its at 60.000 lines of code, quite advanced. I got it running on a steamdeck at 60 fps even with 4 kilometers of draw distance with thousands of trees and procedural terrain thanks to doing tons of custom shaders and a few engine edits.
  - mattfrommars 7mo ago
    incredible. And this was all using $20 plan from Claude or do you pay extra for Claude bandwidth?

hmokiguess 7mo ago

I saw the demo video, in all honesty, they felt really lifeless to me. The snowboard one was the one that most caught my attention but then the mechanics, and movements of the character, made it seem like it's really bad physics. Do you have a published game I could try rather than these demos? I'm curious

htdt 7mo ago
Fair point, these demos are essentially raw single-run output, not cherry-picked or polished. The goal was showing the pipeline works end-to-end, not producing a finished game. I'm planning to do a proper full game with more iteration and publish it as a playable build, not just a video. That should give a much better sense of actual quality ceiling.
- bgirard 7mo ago
  I'd love to see the results of that. I think calling a single prompt iteration lifeless misses the point. It's like looking at a game that has had a few hours of development and saying it's bad. Games need iterations. Seeing your results as the first iteration is impressive. I can see follow-up prompts and custom tweaking get really good results! Last summer I built a factorio-like automation game with older models and over time the game really started to take life.
- lexicality 7mo ago
  Were those three games the best results you got? Only the bike one appeared to have an actual ... game to it. The "Racing game" appeared to be a car following a set path with a freecam and there didn't seem to be any gameplay mechanics in the snowboarding one, just a physics entity wildly crashing down a hill with no consequences or score.
  - deleted 7mo ago
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  - johncormick 7mo ago
    The year is 2050 and those are all AAA games.

andreagrandi 7mo ago

Context: I've been using agents (both Claude Code and Codex) for my daily work and for personal projects, but always in domains where I had some knowledge and I'm currently happy with them. 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?

htdt 7mo ago
That's exactly the failure mode this project exists to solve. The core issue is Claude Code has no way to see what it's producing — code compiles fine but assets are floating, paths lead nowhere, layouts are garbage. It even told you as much. Godogen closes that loop: after writing code, it captures screenshots from the running engine and a vision model evaluates them. That's the difference between "compiles but broken" and "actually playable." And yes — providing design docs helps a lot. The pipeline generates those automatically (visual reference, architecture, task plan), but you can provide your own and customize the skills to match your vision.
- dr_kiszonka 7mo ago
  It would be a hit, if you packaged that loop as an MCP. Opus can make really pretty 3d models even using three.js primitives but they tend to have serious issues (like facial features inside the head). Being able to have it automatically generate a set of screenshots and Gemini scrutinize them and provide structured feedback would be a time saver. Curiously, I could not get Gemini 3.1 Pro to ever generate anything even remotely passable.

guitarlimeo 7mo ago

Nice work, must have been a pain to get Godot's formats working with Claude. As another commenter suggested the demo videos don't do any justice to this project - yeah it's the magic that you can generate playable (wouldn't say complete myself) games with a single prompt, but the quality of those is exactly why people are so put off by AI slop. If this was a better harness that acted more like a tool I think it would be seen as more useful. 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").

htdt 7mo ago
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twelvevaginas 7mo ago

“Real games” the most incomplete bullshit you ever saw passed off as a game. 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.

htdt 7mo ago
That was actually my starting point — generating Three.js output that looked okay-ish but broke the moment you touched anything. Godot gives you a real engine with physics, scene trees, which is why the output is more robust even if it's far from polished.

mattfrommars 7mo ago

This is incredible piece of work. I was looking into .claude folder and skim reading it. One thing stood out to me how large it is. 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?

htdt 7mo ago
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parasti 7mo ago
This is entirely based on the "agent skills" system. LLM agent only sees the one-line skill description in its context and "lazy loads" the rest of the skill file on demand.
- jwelten 7mo ago
  The lazy loading approach is smart. We've been publishing agent skills too and the context budget is a real constraint; six skills with reference docs would blow past 30k tokens if loaded eagerly. Filtering at load time based on what the agent actually needs makes a huge difference. Curious if the orchestrator/executor split causes issues with state handoff between the two context forks.

rybosworld 7mo ago

I think this is a cool tech demo. But the commonality I see in all of these "let the agent run free" harnesses is that the output is never something I would want to use/watch/play. 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.

prawn 7mo ago
Maybe OP could try an angle where at various points, the process presents the user with 2-6 options, and they choose their favourite. With a bit of intentional chaos in there, the user and tool could potentially discover interesting game concepts and eventually build them as prototypes.

avaer 7mo ago

How does this stack up against something like Tesana [1], which is also Godot based? Would it be accurate to say that it's like "Tesana but local"? [1] https://tesana.ai/ https://tesana.ai/

EagnaIonat 7mo ago
That site looks like this generations Flash player.
guitarlimeo 7mo ago
A bit misleading marketing there (like always) - all the good looking game videos are actually just AI generated videos (obvious tells: HUD elements wouldn't have scrambled text if they were actual games, rendering of barrels has the worst LOD popout I've ever seen or it's AI), but the actual games are really bad.

samiv 7mo ago

A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. Let there be games! And games there shall be, millions of generated games. Can I go back to the 80's please?

krapp 7mo ago
>A minute of silence to mourn the lost art of making games with passion. There are still... dozens of us left!
htdt 7mo ago
Bold of you to assume I'm not making this with passion, I've been yelling at LLMs for a year straight, that's basically the 80s experience with better coffee
- krapp 7mo ago
  The problem is your passion is for the LLM workflow and not the games, and the end result is going to be a powerful way to generate mediocre games.
  - ianbutler 7mo ago
    The majority of all code written is highly mediocre. Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. The same people who were going to make something good will still make something good, the code imo has very little to do with it. Passion is necessary but insufficient by itself to make good things
    - krapp 7mo ago
      >Acting like most people made good and enjoyable games when it was handcoded is just not right. Every good and enjoyable game made was handcoded, with art, music, dialogue and design created with intent. I have yet to see a game created with an LLM that's even worth playing, despite countless LLM enthusiasts declaring the death of art , design and programming. A tool that takes a simple prompt and generates a game from it isn't capable of any of that, and the necessary passion is nonexistent. It's an interesting technical demo but it's useless for gamedev unless your only goal is churning out programmatic slop, which is exactly what it will be used for.

slopinthebag 7mo ago

Everything about this feels like AI slop, including the post which is very clearly AI written. I'm sorry but if you aren't even willing to put any effort into writing a post showcasing what you have worked on what is the point of anybody taking a serious look? And the tools are clearly AI generated as well, I can even tell where you used Gemini in some places because you left in it's distinctive comments. Not to mention the showcase games are meme-tier. 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.

htdt 7mo ago
Fair enough on the writing, I do use LLMs heavily, including for writing. That's what made a solo project of this scope possible at all alongside a full-time job. The generated skill files aren't meant to be human-readable, they're machine instructions. On the 'tool vs generator' framing — I think both matter. Assisted tooling is the obvious win, but full autonomy unlocks different use cases entirely. Curious where we'll end up.

stephc_int13 7mo ago

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

empressplay 7mo ago
Yeah exactly, build a library of a hundred or so stock game templates and just let the model configure / modify them as needed. Would cover most use cases.
Closi 7mo ago
I wouldn't feel that smug considering these are single prompt generations on a pretty small project. As Two Minute Paper's always says, it's not just about what this looks like at the moment, it's about what this might look like another three breakthroughs down the line. While you can't guarantee further breakthroughs, at the rate of advancement and pace of improvement, you would have to be brave to bet on no further breakthroughs.
- stephc_int13 7mo ago
  I will happily re-evaluate on the next breakthrough, but for now, for an aspiring gamedev, this is likely a waste of time. Models can be used more efficiently, at the moment, but you have to understand what you are doing, and not trying to one-shot anything.
  - popcorncowboy 7mo ago
    I agree with you, but I think it skips over the fundamental point of the demo - that this is possible at all. The door is unlocked. I expect where commercial interests will take this over the next year or two, even without further "model breakthroughs" will be enough to change how many devs engage in game development. Well done htdt.
- dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
  And a few more breakthroughs after that it might look like sticks and stones ... who knows!

leontloveless 7mo ago

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c0m47053 7mo ago

Very interesting. Have to admit, I assumed Godot was just out of the realm of agentic dev. I decided to actually build a game a few months ago, and went with Raylib (with C#), and it worked out pretty well (https://github.com/alexwlsnr/neo-arena https://github.com/alexwlsnr/neo-arena) 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!

fxwin 7mo ago
fyi that link is dead, maybe the repo is set to private?
justinhj 7mo ago
for what it's worth I have been building a game with godot and using gemini flash and pro to help. it has no trouble editing gd script and scenes. so far it hasn't failed in anything i asked it to do

_QrE 7mo ago

Anecdotal, but I have used Claude to help me write sections of games that I'm (sometimes) working on in Godot fairly recently (Opus 4.5 iirc). It's been very helpful, and it's been very easy to guide it to do this. It came up with approaches of calculating targeting and movement that I would not have thought of myself. 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.

soared 7mo ago

This will do poorly with the HN crowd because they can write or understand code. This is an incredible tool for TikTok/nontechnical people who don’t know anything about ai, and want to see their random idea turned into a game. Really cool!

dinkumthinkum 7mo ago
I agree, it will be a boon to other content creators on YouTube: "The #1 Way to Make $181,020 A Month With Games -- Join My Skool"

Underphil 7mo ago

There's understandably a lot of negativity in here, myself included. But isn't this at least good to create a "jumping off" point for building a game? The demos might be shit but using them to create a basis for an idea seems like it could remove a lot of the headaches of prototyping and early-stage burnout.

deleted 7mo ago
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eudamoniac 7mo ago

I can't decide if this is impressive or not. At first I think it is, but also the best demos you could find were not good games, and likely not even good bases for further iteration. It seems pretty likely that this tool would increase the speed of shipping a salable game by zero minutes. So it's kind of impressive but at the same time not.

tartoran 7mo ago
If you put in the effort to polish the scenes, mechanics, and overall feel, then with a great idea and a few iterations, you could potentially build a sellable game. I honestly do not know what it takes to sell a game, but if you have a strong idea and want to put it online, a tool like this can take you surprisingly far and let you focus on the bigger-picture parts of the game. I think it's quite impressive without even trying it. I think more and more tools like this will pop up soon.
- eudamoniac 7mo ago
  Well no, what I mean is I've used Godot a lot and I think it's likely that the effort to polish this output is more than the effort to start from scratch. Godot as a codebase is very easy to become horrendous spaghetti. Even though this is some form of a start, I kind of doubt it would decrease time to ship by any amount, maybe even increase time to ship, for the same reasons that greenfielding is faster and easier than incrementally refactoring a legacy clusterfuck written by juniors.
  - tartoran 7mo ago
    You may be right, I don't have any experience with Godot but as a noob game dev it feels to me that if I have a good clear idea (perhaps a simple one), a Claude skills pipeline would help move things faster, get to something roughly working relatively easily. From there to a polished game there's considerable effort, I'm sure. Since I've had a pretty good experience with LLMs and making Lua games my inclination is to think this would propel me quite well with Godot as well. What do I know...

Madmallard 7mo ago

"real games"

aed 7mo ago

Woah! This is very timely. My 9-year-old has been playing around with Claude Code and creating games, mostly with Phaser. He's dabbling with some 3D games and I was just looking at Godot as an option yesterday. He and I will give this a spin this weekend.

stevefan1999 7mo ago

This thing is spot on for me as I'm evaluating trying to build games in Godot using Claude Code, but in C# (I have hacks to make it run on NativeAOT), but the result is...mixed. I see only GDScript option is available and that's kinda sad.

weakfish 7mo ago

I think the software engineer types in this thread misunderstand what makes game developers tick. A lot of people here do game dev as a way to explore new ways to code. My sister is an indie dev and to her, code is an unavoidable means to an end (creating a game). So many games are absolutely spaghetti on the inside because the creator is deeply uninterested in the art of code. So to that end, LLMs are actually an awesome thing to enable creators to experiment more freely. 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.

socalgal2 7mo ago
There are many great games absolutely full of attrocious code.
- djfdat 7mo ago
  I'd wager that there are no great games without some amount of atrocious code.
azney 7mo ago
Yes, in fact there is a ridiculous amount of people in software that want to gatekeep how others do things. In the context of making a personal project it will never ever matter whether you know how to code or not as long as you enjoyed the process. It probably stems from a place of fear and pride.
- deleted 7mo ago
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cure_42 7mo ago
This doesn't just generate the code though. It generates the "art" and everything else as well. Ideas are beyond cheap. It's the personal creativity that makes games good or bad. And saying the code doesn't matter is just ignorant. In plenty of great games the art doesn't matter. In plenty of others the code doesn't matter. Or the dialogue. But the reverse is just as true. In a game with tight, fluid player controls, the code to make that happen takes just as much creativity and skill and human touch as any other form of art. A driving sim made by someone deeply uninterested in the code they write will never feel good to play. It is just so disingenuous to say that people who focus more on the code side of game development aren't creators. If I can make a demo with a black rectangle jumping around on some red rectangles and hand it to someone and have them say it feels like they're jumping around as a cat, with no art or animations, I'd say that took creativity and a human touch that ai is nowhere near being able to emulate.

canadiantim 7mo ago

Very impressive! Looks great!

nanobuilds 7mo ago

Was expecting a higher jump for plumbers. Cashiers were already suffering with the self-checkouts for years.

sieep 7mo ago

[flagged]

eucyclos 7mo ago
I say do what makes you happy and don't worry about people like ^this^ guy.
- sieep 7mo ago
  I mean the title of the post claims it can create full games, it can't. Its not even close?
  - GoblinSlayer 7mo ago
    Full game here means it compiles and runs, not that it beats the charts.
dang 7mo ago
Personal attacks, which you crossed into here, are not allowed on HN. Please don't post like this, no matter how you feel about someone else or their work. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
- sieep 7mo ago
  Didn't you guys just make rules about using AI to comment and post? > Don't post generated comments or AI-edited comments. HN is for conversation between humans. Maybe you need to read your own rules: https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html This guy is as blatant as it gets, and you can't/refuse to enforce it. Obvious AI writing with all the tells. Your site is going to crap buddy go select which rules you feel like moderating somewhere else and ban me. Never going on here again, enjoy your AI slop.
  - dang 7mo ago

scumblr 7mo ago

I think this is pretty cool, all things considered. I think it’s unrealistic to expect anything that’s been one-shot to have much polish or charm. 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.

htdt 7mo ago
Thanks! Good point on unit testing — I haven't gone in that direction yet honestly. The current approach is selective: the decomposer identifies genuinely hard elements (custom physics, procedural generation) and those get dedicated testing. Routine stuff like movement or UI doesn't, since the visual QA already catches most breakage there. Haven't hit real problems with code correctness so far, but I could see unit tests becoming more relevant as projects scale up. Worth experimenting with.

EagnaIonat 7mo ago

Claude codes fine in GoDot. You have to explicitly give it the version you are working on. Claude’s the only one I’ve got working with GoDot.

ryan14975 7mo ago

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bni 7mo ago

With games we just need some really good slop filters on the storefronts. I mean this has been the case already for some time even before AI

socalgal2 7mo ago

Here's Google's: https://www.youtube.com/playablesbuilder/ https://www.youtube.com/playablesbuilder/

SilentEditor 7mo ago

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termwatch 7mo ago

But can it build Doom?

htdt 7mo ago
Give it a couple of model upgrades :)

martinvalchev 7mo ago

The lazy-loading approach for the API reference is clever. Did you consider embedding a smaller, distilled subset of the most-used classes permanently in context, and only lazy-loading the long tail? Curious whether the overhead of deciding what to load ever causes cascading errors where the wrong API gets pulled in. Also interested in the visual QA separation - using a model that sees only screenshots and never the code is a genuinely good idea for avoiding confirmation bias. Did you try using Claude for that role too, or was Gemini Flash specifically chosen for cost reasons?

htdt 7mo ago
The two-tier loading is exactly that — ~128 common classes always visible as one-liners, full docs loaded on demand. The agent does sometimes pull the wrong class, but since each task runs in a forked context, a bad lookup doesn't cascade beyond that task. Gemini Flash for QA was a capability choice — it's able to catch spatial issues like z-fighting and clipping, which is not obvious since vision models aren't typically trained on broken game screenshots. Turned out to work surprisingly well.

Kachilu 7mo ago

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skwuwu 7mo ago

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gneuron 7mo ago

Hey bro, been working with the Godot MCP for about a year now myself. This is really cool! The two loops I think you should add / address: 3D assets / rigging. This is the hardest thing to do in the current Claude Code to Godot MCP loop right now. Claude can reliably make 3D assets using the in game creator, but ideally you have a system that works with external models (or better yet, generates them ala something like spline or similar system in Blender) and then can rig them up in game. 2. Expanding the evaluation loop from just screenshots to actually playing the game. I just started building a game in Claude Code Desktop, and the Claude agent there can actually PLAY the game. That's a huge unlock. I've been thinking about how to get this same functionality in the Godot MCP server but if your system can do it that would be awesome too.

techcam 7mo ago

Feels like we have great tooling for code, but prompts are still mostly trial-and-error. Curious how people are validating them today.

vunderba 7mo ago

The 2D sprites in the bike riding scene are a bit of a mess. Honestly consistent 2D animation is difficult. You've basically got two approaches right now - use a openpose style controlnet representing a walk cycle in conjunction with img2img OR you can try using a walk LoRA with WAN to generate video and then clip out 4-8 frames that represent a good loop from the video. https://imgpb.com/ELJfWpi https://imgpb.com/ELJfWpi

yagizdagabak 7mo ago

Awesome stuff, what does it use to generate the assets?

sacredSatan 7mo ago

Thanks for not cherry picking the output. The demos look great for a single prompt output. I can see myself playtesting a mechanic that I just thought of but would probably take longer to implement in my own WIP game etc. I think this has great value just now, can't wait for it to get better. Keep at it.

saltynews 7mo ago

As a Godot user, GDScript's unique syntax often trips up standard LLMs, so your custom language reference is a game changer. Integrating Claude Code directly into the game dev pipeline like this shows where the future of 'Agentic Workflow' is heading.

dahrkael 7mo ago

this is great, specially the evaluation loop. the worst part of using AI to make games is testing things work as intended after every modification specially if its a complex game. whats the art creation pipeline?

neilsharma425 7mo ago

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EigenFluxAI 7mo ago

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wslh 7mo ago

Amazing! We have played with it to create an animation based on "The Three Little Pigs". Video available here [1]. [1] https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7XjhhlzIZ1br/view?usp=sharing https://drive.google.com/file/d/1ozZmWcSwieZQG0muYjbj7Xjhhlz...

buyTheDip 7mo ago

Very cool. Thanks for sharing! This introduced me to Godot, gave me an excuse to use Claude code and a few hours later had it all installed and created my first game/simulation. Experimenting each night with a new game idea, genre, style, etc. Really fun. Thanks again!

4riel 7mo ago

I am not a game developer but a platform developer. The custom reference approach is spot on and that's a massive job. I compiled 202 tips from 10 'important' CC users into a repo and plugin. You might want to ask CC to review it and see if any of it is worth implementing in your skills as well: https://github.com/4riel/cc-bible https://github.com/4riel/cc-bible