1DC

放浪の機械術師 AI Systems Builder & Operator🔻 Game & Software Engineer 🔻 Consultant 🔺 Creator of @Meta_Machina//@MetaMachina_RW

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Here's a 2 minute quick preview of the driving and world exploration part of my survival RPG. Too much to list what was built, everything built from nothing. Landscape, assets, effects, systems, destruction, combat, weather, UI. World lane is about 40% complete. Game will be fully scripted, fully voiced, open world, play the main story or do what you want. Explore, survive or die.

Built with full AI agent stack, Claude, Codex. Zero hand coding. 30 days in on this current build.

[In development]

#AI

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@theparuchh I told Claude my monster needed to move like a gorilla, it did pretty good imo.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

"What do you mean you're directing a fleet of AI agents for game development? How?"

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@mattvanswol Justified crash out should one happen.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@ClipXClipX She doesn’t want to lose her work boyfriend.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

The score gets cast like actors: two takes, a pick, a reason.

This is the music picker, a browser tool the agents built so I can audition this game's music. W1 is "First Light on the Wastes", the arrival theme. Take one, take two, back to take one. Then my note: take one plays the first time you enter the world, on foot, as the intro. Take two plays every time after. Pick. The counter goes from 183 picked to 184.

There's a lot to pick from. By Sept 29 the radio alone had 12 stations, 130 songs and 386 minutes. When I noticed there was no heavy metal station, five stations were added that night.

And sound is where I stopped over-engineering prompts. A lane burned credits on a hood-slap warning with long technical prompts and a waveform picker. I typed "someone banging on the top of a old truck roof" into ElevenLabs. One take, unedited, shipped.

AI made music cheap. It didn't make it right for the first minute you step into a world. That call is the one I keep.

Staged: a re-enactment of a pick I actually made, filmed in a scratch copy so my real picks were never touched. Dev tool, development footage, not final. Sound on: those are the two takes.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Not all of this game happens behind the wheel. When you get home, you dig.

This is the shelter in Meta Machina: StarFall, the family's home under the yard. Right click bare earth and someone goes down to dig it out. Here it's Otto. The game asks what the new space is for: the commons. Then what goes in it: a sofa. Mara builds it, and Wren sits down on it, facing the right way, while Otto sleeps on the infirmary cot next door. One take, no cuts. The digging and building are sped up, and the HUD says by how much.

The shelter is the oldest part of this game. It was a 2D game first, then a 2D game with art, then a 3D cutaway, before the world around it existed.

How it got this far: before the agents built anything new, a Claude Code lane audited my original fourteen-line brief against what already worked, and then built only the gaps: stats that rise with use, items as data, a store with a weight cap, save and load end to end. When it closed out on Oct 2, every one of the 155 buildable objects you could reach could actually be built.

That's the habit I'd steal for any AI build. Agents love to start fresh. Make them audit what exists first. The gaps are almost always smaller than the rewrite.

Staged: a dev crate start, every store full, so the build isn't waiting on scrap. Every order after that is a click. Development footage, not final. Sound on.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

Commons first or workshop first?

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@venturetwins @GoogleDeepMind Yet still no subscription based API to generate the seven thousand dog pictures I need. Hard Pass.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@harden_369741 This journey through development has shown me how many tools the industry is actually lacking, or at least proper tools that work within the dev environments.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

I painted this game's world by hand. Then I stopped asking the agents for fixes and asked for a brush.

This is the map painter, built by a Claude Code lane inside the game in Godot on Sept 28. Type a place and it flies there, here a salt flat shoreline. Then you paint biomes like a canvas: salt pushed out into the sand, a tongue of desert basin cut into the salt, a band of red desert. Press V and the overlay shows every biome class in its own colour.

It was proved on scratch copies before it ever touched my map: 709 of 709 ground texels and 28 of 28 scatter regions repainted, and all of it survived a reboot.

Then came the better question: which of this should I be painting at all? The edges between biomes I'd have done stroke by stroke got drawn by a rule instead.

If you keep filing the same ticket, stop asking for the fix. Ask for the tool, and then ask if math can do it.

Close crop on purpose: we don't show the whole map. Nothing in this clip was saved. Dev tool, development footage, not final.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@harden_369741 After about 5 tries and zero available resources on GitHub, I default immediately to building my own tools because it takes only a couple hours and I can get back to work.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

An AI agent will build you a combat system in a weekend. It will not notice your soldiers are holding rifles with their elbows.

This is the combat layer in Meta Machina: StarFall. When the truck stops, the fight changes games. You give orders (attack, defend, item, move), hit GO, and the round plays out, with close cutaways when a hit lands. Feared, dazed and bleeding stack. Land the timing and you get a bonus. When it ends, the party record carries health, injuries and stamina into the rest of the run.

Here's what the agents missed, and what it taught me.

On Sept 27 I opened the combat scene and the fighters were holding long guns with their arms bent backwards. The lane measured the support elbows against the animations we'd bought: 136 degrees off the hinge on the rifle, 171 on the bazooka, where the bought clips never go much past 90. It wasn't any of the three suspected causes. It was a fourth, the arm solver, and a gate now checks every long-gun pose.

Then a fighter who went down kept the pistol bolted to her hand, and the death animation swung it up into an aim at the man who dropped her. The log said she was down. The frame said she was still fighting. Now the gun falls to the floor.

Agents ship what they can measure. Deciding what gets measured is still a human job, and it's most of the job.

Early combat build: test floor, placeholder names, stand-in fighters. Development footage, not final. Sound on.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

Gatling or bazooka?

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@AshCrypto More Axie Infinity should fill that gap.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

The game is based around you picking and creating your own family to survive, so I allowed for many different options and types of families. Always 2 parents, 2 teens. The lines are already scripted, you pick voice that works for you.

The real hurdle was developing a script that allowed 1 parent to be dominant without anyone ever saying a name or role. That's you're "lead" character. If one of the parent's dies, the other takes over. If they die, the teens take over, if no one in the family is left the game ends whether you completed the story or not. Your family remains are marked with crosses in the wasteland.

I would like to someday be able to connect peoples play through here with the FPS MMO that takes place after this story and timeline.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Hundreds of tools went into this game, and almost none of them are the game.

This is MM Audition. Claude Code agents built it in Godot so I can cast voices the way you'd cast actors: put the line on the face and watch.

Parent 1 says his line, the words lighting up on the timeline as he speaks. Then a shout, close up. Then a laugh, from three-quarter. Then the Voice tab: the recorded take, then a candidate voice, said on the same head. There are 31 faces in it.

Why build a tool instead of writing a better prompt: early on, a lane cast voices for the whole cast before the script was approved. 54 audition sets, and they all sounded alike. We stopped, finished the script first (6,236 lines of NPC dialogue across 69 scripts), and now a voice gets tried against a face before anyone commits to it.

An agent can generate a thousand voices. It can't hear which one belongs to that face. So I had the agents build me the room where I can.

Dev tool. Nothing was cast in this clip. Development footage, not final. Sound on.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Then there's a merge and the merge becomes the new check point for 2 new lanes in a current updated state, with fall backs incase something isn't right. So there is no destructive building. It's also swappable, If I have a new character and decide 3 days in I don't like the body or clothes, I can just swap them out, new check point created. Downside is the terabytes of storage, but currently implementing a 2 week purge since old data and images are only used for future social marketing.

Perspective below, this is what's in the build, not including archived. This isn't final game size, but the structure that currently holds it together.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Day 92 of building a game with AI agents. 21,214 commits. More than 5,600 agent sessions. One person directing.

On Oct 13 Xbox launched Xbox Labs with this line: "Coding became the first major workload for agents because they can write, run, and test software. Games share many of those same properties."

They're right. Here's the part that doesn't make the announcement.

This is the haboob in Meta Machina: StarFall: a wall of dust rolls across the desert, the light goes amber, then brown, and then you're driving by the gauges. Claude Code agents built it in Godot. Getting it to where I wanted it took about a month.

The word haboob is in 608 commits, on 49 different days. The agents could make a dust wall on day one. What they couldn't do was know it was wrong.

In September I told them the haboob had gone invisible. That wasn't taste, it was geometry: its only painted face was 4,185 units away, and I'd driven in from behind it. Then the wall came down like a flat curtain, where real haboobs spread toward you along the ground, so the lanes pulled ten real photos before they changed a line. Then on Oct 7 I said go global. Now it's one world event: a closed wall on every horizon, leaning into a dome tall enough to block the sun.

Every one of those turns started with me saying, in one sentence, what was wrong. Building is cheap now. Knowing what right looks like is the work.

Development footage, not final. Sound on.

Meta Machina: StarFall is in development and coming to Steam. Follow @1DigitalC to watch it get built.

Drive through it or wait it out?

[1DC @1DigitalC]

@UnrealEngine Lmk when an agent can work on GMCv2 GMAS directly and I’ll build the greatest fps mmo ever.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

The characters are organized by race/region/ lore of the game. The voice system matches, also can convert regular created audio scripts into different dialects. So if my Asian guy doesn't sound Asian enough I can tweak it. Since these systems leave anomalies in the sound, like plosives or sibilance, there's a final system that cleans the audio up of that.

Changing a single line of script, normally 2-3 sentences takes about 30-40 seconds. The agents can batch it though and do up to 1000 scripts at once, but I only have so much PC.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

The file structure. To be clear its not all agents at once on one "thing". The game is built in a way the paths just never actually cross like that.

Example is my character lane. Heads, Bodies, Outfits, Hair. Are 4 different lanes that still tie into 1 character build. So while 1 agent is working on the head, another can be fixing the outfit or hair or voice, it all feeds into the 1 character pipeline. 1 account could have 1 agent working on all 4 lanes separately, but it kills usage fast. I track agents running on lanes with a basic tracker from another machine, but will be moving this over to the actual work station so I can track token usage. (I only use tokens during important sprints or when I'm out of usage and need to do side jobs not game related.)

[1DC @1DigitalC]

I setup lanes for long dev session , not “agents”. Lanes anyone can work on, agents forget. So a lane can have 3-4 agents from different accounts working on it, doesn’t matter, they never lose context no matter how short or long a session is going. I often have to stop a runner on a lane because it is out of Fable then I put a different agent from a different account on that lane to continue working.

[1DC @1DigitalC]

Agents review. I get every completed round pushed to my phone for summarized review + issues and resolutions or resolution options. If I don’t like any of their resolutions, I tell them to do it my way because it’s generally better and thinks outside of AI’s “logic box” I refer to it as.