Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

github.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

61–70 of 163 posts

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

#61

Post by alganet »

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 history?

[0]: https://github.com/maciej-trebacz/tower-of-time-game/commit/...

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

#62

Post by garciasn »

gametorch wrote: post #37
stavros wrote: post #32

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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 This has worked extremely well for me.

I have been working on an end-to-end modeling solution for my day job and I'm doing it entirely w/Claude.

I am on full-rework iteration three, learning as I go on what works best, and this is definitely the way. I'm going to be making a presentation to my team about how to use AI to accelerate and extend their day-to-day for things like this and here's my general outline:

1. Tell the LLM your overall goal and have it craft a thoughtful product plan from start to finish.

2. Take that plan and tell it to break each of the parts into many different parts that are well-planned and thoroughly documented, and then tell it to give you a plan on how to best execute it with LLMs.

3. Then go piece by piece, refining as you go.

The tool sets up an environment, gets the data from the warehouse, models it, and visualizes it in great detail. It took me about 22 hours of total time and roughly 2 hours of active time.

It's beautiful, fast, and fully featured. I am honestly BLOWN AWAY by what it did and I can't wait to see what others on my team do w/this. We could have all done the setup, data ingestion, and modeling, no question; the visualization platform it built for me we absolutely could NOT have done w/the expertise we have on staff--but the time it took? The first three pieces probably were a few days of time, but the last part, I have no idea. Weeks? Months?

Amazing.

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

#63

Post by AnotherGoodName »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #56
AnotherGoodName wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've come to this same conclusion pretty strongly in the past few months in particular. I actually had negative comments on my experience with AI previously. For all the talk of AI hitting a ceiling the latest tools have improved greatly. I'm literally doing things in hours that'd previously take weeks with little issue. I do of course have to think about the prompts and break it down to a fine grained level and i al…

> 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 good coding practices for all of this. I could have spent a week coming up to speed on that library and re-remembering all the Python syntax or i could have fought against doing it at all but instead, one hour of prompting, "here it is boss, done".

I had similar results doing some updates to the app itself too fwiw. Android dev has a lot of boilerplate. "Create a new screen to show a list of images in a recycler view". Everyone who's done Android knows the boilerplate involved in what i just stated. Again 1 shot results. Unlike the above this is something i know how to do well, i just didn't want to type 100's of lines of boilerplate.

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

#64

Post by cootsnuck »

stavros wrote: post #40
gametorch wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 This has worked extremely well for me.

I wrote a whole PRD for this very simple idea, but still the bug persisted, even though I started from scratch four times. Granted, some had different bugs.

Have you tried with both Claude opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 pro?

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

#65

Post by stavros »

cootsnuck wrote: post #64
stavros wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I wrote a whole PRD for this very simple idea, but still the bug persisted, even though I started from scratch four times. Granted, some had different bugs.

Have you tried with both Claude opus 4 and Gemini 2.5 pro?

Opus 4, Sonnet 4, o3, o4-mini-high.

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

#66

Post by M4v3R »

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 it was created the best way would be to read the prompts file from top to bottom. For example the EnergySystem.ts file was created right after I was done with enemy pathfinding, spawing and tower shooting and it was created from scratch by the AI using the prompt "I want to implement an Energy subsystem where..."

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

#67

Post by recursive »

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…

Coincidentally those seem to be strongly correlated with success in old fashioned application development as well.

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

#68

Post by AndrewKemendo »

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 and 100x my productivity

The gap seems to be between people who never knew how to build, looking for a perfect Oracle that would be like a genie in a lamp, then mad when its actual work

The thing the last few years have beat into me is that most engineers are actually functionally bad engineers who only know 1:1000th of what they should know in order to know how to build a successful project end to end

My assumption was that all of the bad engineers I worked with in person were a accidental sample of some larger group of really good ones (who I’ve also been able to work with over the years) and that it’s just rare to find an actual capable engineer who understands the whole process

Turns out that’s a trivial minority (like every other field) and most people are pretty bad at what they do

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

#70

Post by jaggs »

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…

> Where are you reading “a lot of posts” making this specific claim?

Reddit.

Post reply on HN