Indie Developer & Programmer 💻🎮
Building games, apps & AI-powered tools.
Sharing my journey, ideas, and what I learn along the way.
Code. Create. Explore.
I've been adding more depth and detail to Pine & Parcel 🌲
I'm trying to get the best quality I can while keeping it light enough for as many people as possible to explore in their browser when the full experience is ready.
Built with Codex, Blender and @threejs.
When I was writing Unreal Engine 1, my time was divided as follows:
- Around 30% went to seriously deep coding on hard problems: assembly language texture mappers, C++ BSP trees, data persistence, object oriented systems design, and networking.
- Around 70% was just typing and refactoring large bodies of code needed for a complete engine feature set. This was not hard, and while I was doing it my mind was mostly on the deeper coding topics, thinking and planning for what's next. It didn't feel much different from vibe coding today, except that it was just me typing code on an IBM Model M keyboard rather than prompting it and reviewing the results.
So, it has always seemed perfectly logical that we would rely on AI for that 70%, once the AI could do it with a similar quality standard as we could, which has never been perfection. It came as no surprise that, after a few years of AI model evolution, it was able to take the reigns on that 70% and free up programmers' time for more valuable tasks.
What's more of a surprise is the emergence of AI as a sort of insta-Carmack able to solve hard technical problems quite cleverly and often cleanly, and that it's able to reason about and work in complex 3D scenes both by operating the tools and by directly understanding the raw data files.
I abandoned assembly language in 1998 when out-of-order CPUs made much simpler C/C++ code faster, and never I missed it. If prompting through architectural documents, concept art, and design plans can transcend typing code and tweaking vertices, that will enable developers to spend their time on higher-level, higher value technical and creative tasks.
What matters is the end product, whether it's a game or an engine. Anything developers can do to try out more ideas and make better software and games faster is a win for everyone.
The gaming industry keeps selling us the same open worlds with bigger maps, better reflections and another 200 hours of repetitive side quests.
I want AI-driven worlds where every character has a memory, every conversation matters and the story genuinely changes because of what I do.
Give me that over another 8K puddle.
A lot of folks getting into game dev with ai don’t know this but, you really need to make sure your game is fun without a bunch of fancy art.
Llms make it too easy to build visually rich levels with no real gameplay. That’s backwards!
DeepSeek V4.1 Flash 1017 vs GPT 6.1 Sol
I tested this rocket launch scene and DeepSeek absolutely cooked with this model.
DeepSeek : $0.78, 3 mins
GPT 6.1 Sol: $6.10, 5 mins
Nearly 8x cheaper than Sol, and faster too. This thing is a beast.
Лучшее, что я видел за последнее время — чел пилит ASCII MMORPG, в которой вся графика состоит из букв и символов.
Да, буквально весь мир, персонажи, окружение и спецэффекты нарисованы разноцветным текстом.
Автор сейчас экспериментирует с магией, визуалом и боссами. Я прям залип на то, как из нескольких десятков символов получается такая красота.
Буквально сны при температуре 37,2.
Via: https://t.co/vtYXAaEioi
Opus 5.5 found a pretty clever way to turn concept art into a playable 3D world
The workflow starts with a cel-shaded village concept generated with GPT.
Then:
> Opus 5.5 recreates the layout with simple 3D blocks
takes a screenshot from a fixed camera
> GPT paints over those blocks using the concept art as reference
> Opus builds a shader that projects the painting back onto the 3D geometry
The result still looks like the original illustration, but it’s now a real 3D space you can walk around and enter.
The same pipeline was repeated for interiors.
Characters were generated through GPT Images and then animated with Minimax H3.
This feels like a really interesting shortcut for getting a very specific 2D art direction into an actual playable game without manually modeling every detail.
Un experto que examinaba la pezuña de una vaca que tenía dificultades para caminar notó un pequeño punto negro en la base. Al ver que salían burbujas del punto, comenzó a abrir la zona con cuidado. Debajo del punto, que parecía una pequeña marca, se reveló un daño mucho mayor.
I've been adding more depth and detail to Pine & Parcel 🌲
I'm trying to get the best quality I can while keeping it light enough for as many people as possible to explore in their browser when the full experience is ready.
Built with Codex, Blender and @threejs.