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Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

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Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#71

Post by alganet »

M4v3R wrote: post #66
alganet wrote: post #61

I think indie games could be a really good use case for coding AIs. Low stakes, fun-oriented, sounds like a match. The first commit[0] seems to have a lot of code, but no `PROMPTS.md` yet. For example, `EnergySystem.ts` is already present on this first commit, but later appears in the `PROMPTS.md` in a way that suggests it was made from scratch by the AI. Can you elaborate a bit more on this part of the repository hi…

Because this was a game jam entry with one week deadline I was going pretty fast and didn't bother to use source control for the first 2-3 days of work, hence the huge initial commit. I also weren't writing down prompts as I went, only after the game was finished I went back in my chat history in the tools I used and copied all the prompts to the `PROMPTS.md` file. If you want to follow the history of this project as…

Thanks for clarifying!

Also, good catch in using the chat history to reconstruct the first phases of work.

I believe it can be a fun experiment for others to try to reproduce it from scratch using the prompts and image assets only.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#72

Post by Swizec »

twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

> what works best with AI-coding: a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces

As a tech lead who also wears product owner hats sometimes: This is how you should do it with humans also. At least 70% of my job is translating an executive’s “Time travel tower game. No bugs” into that long series of prompts with a strong architectural vision that people can work on as a team with the right levels of abstraction to avoid stepping on each other’s toes.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#73

Post by mberning »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #68
twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim > a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces. This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s been phenomenally useful…

100x is a bold statement.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#74

Post by barrkel »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #68
twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim > a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces. This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s been phenomenally useful…

The bottleneck IME is people. It's almost never code. It's getting alignment, buy-in, everyone rowing in the same direction.

Tech that powers up an individual so they can go faster can be a bit of a liability for a company, bus factor 1 and all that.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#75

Post by mberning »

stavros wrote: post #32
twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

I tried to build a simple static HTML game for the board game Just One, where you get a text box, type a word in, and it's shown full screen on the phone. There's a bug where, when you type, the text box jumps around, and none of the four LLMs I tried managed to fix it, no matter how much I prompted them. I don't know how you guys manage to one-shot entire games when I can't even stop a text box from jumping around t…

Same. I had some idea that I wanted to build a basic sinatra webapp with a couple features. First version was pretty good. Then I asked it to use tailwind for the css. Again pretty good. Then I said I wanted to use htmx to load content dynamically. Suddenly it decides every backend method needs to check if the call is from htmx and alter what it does based on that. No amount of prompting could get it to fix it.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#76

Post by johnrob »

AndrewKemendo wrote: post #68
twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim > a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces. This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s been phenomenally useful…

I see 100x used quite a bit related to LLM productivity. It seems extreme because it implies one could generate a year’s worth of value in a few days. I would think delivering features involves too much non coding work for this to be possible.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#77

Post by Kiro »

mberning wrote: post #73
AndrewKemendo wrote: post #68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim? I’ve never seen any serious person make such a claim > a strong and thorough idea of what you want, broken up into hundreds of smaller problems, with specific architectural steers on the really critical pieces. This is how I’ve been using LLM bots since CGPT preview and it’s been phenomenally useful…

100x is a bold statement.

You can easily get to 100x in a greenfield project but you will never get to 100x in a legacy codebase.

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#78

Post by [deleted] »

stavros wrote: post #32
twalkz wrote: post #30

I'm really enjoying reading over the prompts used for development: ( https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/blob/ma... ) A lot of posts about "vibe coding success stories" would have you believe that with the right mix of MCPs, some complex claude code orchestration flow that uses 20 agents in parallel, and a bunch of LLM-generated rules files you can one-shot a game like this with the prompt "create a…

I tried to build a simple static HTML game for the board game Just One, where you get a text box, type a word in, and it's shown full screen on the phone. There's a bug where, when you type, the text box jumps around, and none of the four LLMs I tried managed to fix it, no matter how much I prompted them. I don't know how you guys manage to one-shot entire games when I can't even stop a text box from jumping around t…

[deleted]

Re: Show HN: I AI-coded a tower defense game and documented the whole process

#79

Post by aprilthird2021 »

AnotherGoodName wrote: post #63
aprilthird2021 wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. What's an example of this? Some of the ones I see most are: converting legacy code to something modern, building a greenfield app or feature in an unfamiliar language / framework / space. But at work I don't have these types of jobs, and I want to get this productivity speed up, but right now I'm stuck at it helps a lot but not turn…

I recently had a need to create educational animations. These were programmatically created using the Manim library in Python. I'm a mobile dev by trade. The best interaction i had recently was with Python and the Manim library specifically which are not my area of expertise. This was a series of "Create an animation that shows X with a graph of the result over variables Y". AI gave a one shot successful results with…

Would that have taken you weeks though?

I imagine reading through a few articles and examples could have gotten you there. I never heard of Manim before but found these pretty quickly:

https://docs.manim.community/en/stable/examples.html

https://manimclass.com/plot-a-function-in-manim/

I am not trying to pick at you, but it feels like what I am currently able to do with AI, shave off a few hours, but not weeks.

I agree with you the ease of cutting through boilerplate is a big win, but it also doesn't register as weeks worth of work for me...

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