This was made in 2 days and 91% of the Max 20x plan, as the author stated on the Reddit thread, so roughly ~$200. Supposedly, existing free assets were used and weren't generated.
I'd say demos like these stand to profit the most from LLMs, if the goal is to make as much as possible in a few days: a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices, and some skills for the initial 9 classes to pick from. A human would generally spend a lot of time here, thinking about whether the class/skill choices fit their world, what type of progression is fun and isn't. It's also where player testing would be important for a game to set good pacing and balance the difficulty.
Of course, the game itself is barely playable, it randomly stutters when I walk too far away from camp, the character controls are unintuitive, etc. A lot of this stuff could be chipped away by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself, getting a feel for what you want the game to be. That by itself should require a game to take more than a few days, if we expect others to play it and enjoy it. Something simple like movement controls could take many game iterations to iron out, and those aren't hard technical tasks.
Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
> a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans
"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here. As you (and the original author) mentioned, almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries. Almost everything is a copy-paste. The Fable part is linking and debugging until it doesn't crash.
The main value proposition of LLMs is to wash the credit away from the giants and take it for yourself.
I wish we would give credit to Kenney [1] for making sick asset packs, mrdoob for making THREE.js [2], etc. than Fable for running curl/wget...
This demo actually kinda blows my mind and makes me want to purse a game idea I had that wanted this exact aesthetic and capability
It gets said ad nauseam but a lot of software development is remixing. Think about how much gaming innovation happened in the Warcraft and StarCraft map editors. The Birth of tower defense, moba, and probably many more.
That’s not how the content addiction works. The social element is a key part of it—the chaotic nature of the pre-chewed content you so willingly and enthusiastically chow down is precisely what makes it addictive.
It remains to be seen how much of that social element is taken over by LLMs as well. There's already plenty of stories about people retreating into LLMs. Whatever shape and form this all ends up, we're just at the beginning, and the only limit will be how economically and socially sustainable it is (chances are: it's not).
They are unpredictable, yes, but the social element of said chaos is missing and will never be able to replicated by an autocorrect on steroids. AI just will not replace social media.
Now to answer substantially, no frankly unless I'm legally required to I don't credit things. I usually specifically go for licenses that let me do whatever I want. I don't think I've ever credited a library I didn't have to I just use them and make things with them. That's the point of them and no one would raise your point in a pre LLM world imo.
Edit: Like as the point of absurdity no one is thanking the creators of postgres for every project that happens to use postgres. You still made a thing even if you didn't write your database from scratch.
I didn't intend it that way, but I guess I can see it now. The point they made had not crossed my mind (as evidenced by my response of how I usually make projects, it wouldn't have) So to me the OP was complaining about something I saw as what would be a normal process for like a whole bunch of developers working on normal projects.
Frankly I think this is faux outrage now that a lot of people are getting wise to the fact a substantial amount of modern programming is basically simple pipefitting.
It was always true that the amount of people providing the foundations the rest of us do work on was super tiny and that was just kind of accepted as fact at least from my > 11 years in industry and overall 20+ years of programming now. It's only now that the pipefitting may be devalued are people getting in a tizzy.
dude, I don't want to be a hater, but this is a pretty crappy game that barely works. I honest to god could have made this in a week without AI. Is it cool that AI made it in 2 days? Sure, but it's not groundbreaking.
Also, I don't think we're at an inflection point when companies are starting to wisen up to just how much this shit costs.
I have never seen such a hive of negativity and pessimism in my life.
This thinking sand did your job 5x faster. And you could have used the opportunity cost to do other things.
The engineers and artists in this country that are dunking on AI are insane. Asia is openly embracing this tech. They're going to leapfrog us if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.
I mean many people have seen the same technology multiplier in many other industries too in their life time. And to them calling this an inflection point in humanity and expecting them to either panic or cheer seems crazy. So we automated software tasks and made it faster, welcome to declining wages and marginal improvements to consumers.
“Boars are attacking the town! Kill 200 to thin the herd.”
“We tried everything to cure the boars, but we couldn’t. If they go any farther, they’ll infect everything. Kill 200 to stop them from infecting the forest.”
“You are inside your own mind. Your fears surround you. Fear of the boar. Free yourself. Kill 200 dream boars.”
For every ten kill X quests you get a Mankirk's Wife quest or a Hogger and it all works out great. 80% of almost everything is filler, like our bodies are 70% just water, but it's the taste that matters.
There is no evidence for that. Boars are presumably native to Azeroth, and part of its delicately balanced ecosystem. Other species rely the the boars in various ways, either because they prey on the boars themselves or because they keep other species in check that would become problematic and invasive otherwise.
You'd be a fool to spend more than 30 seconds on it if you'd played an actual MMO anytime in the last five years. It's immediately apparent how poor quality AI-generated games like this are.
> Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
I don't know what that means. I can post something random on social media and there is a chance some person will spend 10 minutes on it. I don't need an LLM nor any money for that effect.
> by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself
> a human would generally spend a lot of time here,
This was always the hard part - game engines, asset libraries and all other services / SDKs were always making code-generation cheaper every generation.
Releasing a bug-free, thoughtfully built product requires a lot of attention and product skill.
Yeah, I feel like nobody realizes you can put together premade/open source game base + assets in a weekend. And before LLMs there were guys who specialized in this and got really popular on social media for "making a game in a weekend".
Always interesting reading threads about topics you know deeply and everyone else has no familiarity or understanding about what they are seeing. Stark reminder of how easy it is to be impressed when you don't understand a topic.
>Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
What is the point of all these projects like this, except to say that you did something? (that you didn't actually do but half-assed a minimally plausible version of, so hey)
It's tale as old as time at this point: the LLM produced something sort of shaped like some other software, and did it in an impressively short amount of time, but it's basically impossible to bring a codebase made in this way up to production standards, or to maintain it in any reasonable way. Nobody's gonna pay money for this, or want to play it instead of Warcraft. Why should anybody care?
Ok, this is impressive in terms of gluing things together
Yea it's buggy and janky in places, but equally it's coherent from a 3d perspective and 2d UI one
I don't know how many people have been trying to get claude to vibe code games, but it's really not good at it, I've been fiddling about and trying to make it work for a few months now
Yes, you can make flappy bird or snake level stuff, but anything much bigger honestly just falls over after a while
And that's after lots of prompting and feedback
Now what I'm really interested in here is how much of this was "strongly steered" vs oh that's cool, let's do that, ie trying to "sculpt" and fit an artistic vision of some kind that the driver is envisioning vs liking what it outputs and just asking for more of the same
The distinction between using it as a tool vs just being excited to take whatever it gives you
The other thing I'm wondering is how much of this is strongly indicative of claude's capability with typescript, I personally don't use it, so that might be hampering me more than I realised
This may be an unpopular thing to point out, but to those that are saying it's blindly copying code, I'm pretty sure most of the Wow code on the internet wasn't written in typescript, so there's some transformation going on there, how meaningful it is I'm less that certain about
I'm beginning to feel like I just wasn't ambitious enough[0], I was thinking of this as a good opportunity to see if Fable was capable enough to teach an abstract skill like game design
Though I am happy that the code it's generated so far is actually quite tractable, ie it's been working hard to keep itself maintainable, which honestly is new from my perspective, not sure what other people's experiences have been, but I tend to find that agent's in general are just a bit too willing to increase LOC without enough in the way of features to justify that line count in my mind, it makes the juice just not worth the squeeze in my mind
Anyone who thinks that this makes it a bad WoW clone has probably not played very much WoW. There have always been lots of weird bugs, and recent expansions have only gotten worse.
I haven't played the newer expansions, but the classic client (v1.12.1 in my case) from ~2006 is a nice piece of software. I've run it on old Pentium 3 clients and modern hardware under Win 11 and Wine and it just works everywhere I fire it up. It handles scaling well (I can play it 4K OLED or 1024x768 CRT), it behaves during alt-tab, and every button/tab/shortcut feels thought out.
The term MMO is about the game/server architecture more than the size of the game. MMOs are online games with a single (or sharded) persistent gamestate. That's it.
Most shooters have rounds that restart, breaking the persistence quality of the game. Other games like Minecraft emphasize individual / private servers and break the "single gamestate" proposition. The "Massively" word refers to that
single gamestate that many users can interact with, not how many do actually play.
To me, The "play offline" option is more against the MMO definition than the actual number of players.
"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.
Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
> Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
So if they weren’t the author you’d be tickety-boo with this smart-ass rude reply? Christ almighty.
What was smart asssed, or rude, about it? That's what those games are called. GoldenEye was multiplayer. Halo 2 was online multiplayer. If you were asking what to call a game that has P2P multiplayer support using webrtc and therefore only supported countable concurrent players, my honest thought would be to call it an online multiplayer game and forget about the "massive" part because it's just not relevant. Even though it is meant to mimic the gameplay of games that happen to be MMOs doesn't mean it needs to adopt the moniker. Final fantasy 12 mimicked the gameplay of MMOs, but it's just a "single player game".
On the contrary, if you're trying to convey to a mass audience that what you have built resembles something else, the best strategy is to reference that thing by its most familiar name.
Sorry if I came off as petty. Was just trying to answer honestly, and realized I didn't have the right context.
Everytime i read one of these vibe coded projects i wonder: Is AI capable of building well structured programs? Designs with strong separation of concerns. Clean code. Short, well defined functions.
This is not how I'd design much of this. Does that matter? AI and whatever training data used seems to differ.
The lower the code quality and less coherent the design, the poorer the agent will perform over time as the project grows.
Pure vibe coding pretty much limits the max scope of your project to the capability of the agent, and if you're trying to make something real and maintainable, you'll always end up with something worse than the person who guides it at a lower level.
That being said, there are certainly going to be systemic/built in ways to have coding agents generate coherent architectures. Just it isn't really baked in right now.
Probably an ideal model with current tech is the main coding agent thread that implements things, and a secondary thread that constantly compacts/prunes and cleans up according to specific style rules.
Problem with doing both in same context via AGENTS.md is the LLM often won't adhere to all rules if it's overloaded with many competing instructions. But you can scope the code styling agent prompt tightly and get much higher focus and adherence.
Yes, you just need to tell it to do that. Before I start I go back and forth talking about the architecture and making design docs. If you start with good bones, things go much better than stepping through adding things and ideas ad hoc.
No, you need to tell it the architecture you want. Does anyone really believe you can just say "build the thing" and LLMs will somehow defeat Kolmogorov complexity or that they can read minds? What exactly are you trying to say? They are no good because they aren't magic?
They don't follow basic design principles. If i have to tell the ai every detail of basic design then... Well... I do not consider that very intelligent for a software dev.
I do use AI extensively and get it to spit out vaguely acceptable designs. But I'm doing the design. Even when i have another agent trying to simplify or such the design details are still me.
I don't think people understand how this runs in contrast to the claims of intelligence.
I've built very large structured programs with claude. Talking about the structure is indeed an important part of the exercise. It's also an important factor in success. Context is limited and separation of concerns is an essential part in the LLM being able to do it at all. The chunk of "what needs to be done" needs to be small enough for it to be able to recall and reason about. Bad architecture will result in spinning your wheels constantly changing spaghetti soup that never meets spec.
Building a CAD kernel one of the essential pieces in getting from vaguely working to closing an extremely large number of gaps was some rather strict separation of concerns – without it we were just stuck on perpetual rearchitecting switching from methodology to methodology opening new gaps with each attempt to close others.
I built this with Fable over a couple of days, on the side. It's a vanilla-WoW-flavoured micro-MMO in the browser: nine classic classes, three zones, a 5-player instanced dungeon, parties/duels/trades, and persistent characters. Free to play: https://worldofclaudecraft.com — and fully open source (MIT):
Honestly the most mind-blowing part for me was how much it shipped that I never asked for. The level of polish and completeness coming out of the model genuinely surprised me — quest logs, threat metrics in the combat log, eating/drinking, spirit release on death.
This is cool! I assume a lot of this was Fable orchestrating sub-agents with cheaper models, right? Something I noticed with Fable is that if it spun off three sub-agents in the cloud version of claude code, and then hit the 5-hour usage limit, all the work of those sub-agents would be lost (!). Did you run into the same thing?
One time though, I hit the limit when not running a sub-agent, and the agent resumed after the limit expired. Weird.
Hey. This is a total nightmare in my opinion. The dark mirror of something that I know and love and represents one of the highlights of human digital authorship.
If you'd like to play the actual game with other SWEs I'd invite you to help me start a guild for SWEs: https://unplanned-downtime.com/
I’m on a phone so I can’t see what this does, but it reminded me of this great presentation of a game style agent manager AgentCraft: putting the orc in orchestration https://youtu.be/kR64LOqBBCU?si=d3IS7SVy2lv0hM_A
I was able to put in a username and password, choose a character and "enter the realm" but then within a second of the game graphics loading it crashes so I can't actually see what the game is about. Since it's called "World of Claudecraft" I thought it might be similar in concept to the AgentCraft video I posted. I still don't know if that's true.
Just a hotpatch maintenance window to release The Token Burning Crusade expansion. At this rate we're looking for a true WoC Classic release for the real fans in like a couple weeks.
It's impressive that Fable 5 was able to resynthesise something like this from its training data, but I am really not looking forward to more of this. What's the point?
I am using some llm work to help me bring my mmo project (2013-present) to prod, but my project is much more about pushing the edge of the mmo technology space, and my strategy has as one of its pillars the importance of owning the IP, which means adhering to the current laws in my production pipeline, so I only use unix/linux philosophy and have the llm do small tiny things in skeleton mode so I can rewrite them enough to claim they are actually mine, which they are. Even though I intend to open source the client fully, and the assets, I have to have the copyright so I can assign it to those licenses.
Technically, according to current SCOTUS rulings and precedent set so far (hopefully better things and changes to come, but here we are), this can not be copyrighted by the person who paid for the compute to make it.
When money starts hitting these kinds of projects, the legal wolves will be soon at the door, and it's going to get messy I think. So I still support open source gaming projects, but pure agentic or vibed games are probably going to face tons of challenges in the not too distant future based on my analysis.
Impressive. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise, I don't see them running a fun little browser MMO.
Some people will see this and think "wow, in 5 more years I'll actually be able to make World of Warcraft". Some will see this and think "Wow, I can make World of Warcraft now with 1/100th the cost and engineers". Neither of these thoughts are right, though. The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".
> The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".
What? Writing code is not the bottleneck for how good a game is
Also your figure about there being 60 engineers on the team that launched WoW is completely incorrect. That was the total size of the team near the end and only about five of those were actual developers. Most of those were artists and other designers. I suggest you read the world of Warcraft development diary book it's actually very good. A lot of the development time went into writing tools to support the artists and designers. The actual amount of time that went into coding the game itself was a very small percentage of the overall time spent on the game
It's all about how a game actually feels which comes down to art, balance, progression, music, gameplay, lore, and so much else where you need people with obsessive levels of detail to perfect. I'm not saying LLMs can't help but it's ridiculous to make claims like this
Is it that they are copying existing stuff, or that success is biased to the attempts at something that has a lot of existing examples to plagiarise?
I would propose that plenty of people are trying to use LLMs to build unique new projects, but without having been exposed to solutions to those problems, the LLMs are far less likely to succeed.
This was made in 2 days and 91% of the Max 20x plan, as the author stated on the Reddit thread, so roughly ~$200. Supposedly, existing free assets were used and weren't generated.
I'd say demos like these stand to profit the most from LLMs, if the goal is to make as much as possible in a few days: a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices, and some skills for the initial 9 classes to pick from. A human would generally spend a lot of time here, thinking about whether the class/skill choices fit their world, what type of progression is fun and isn't. It's also where player testing would be important for a game to set good pacing and balance the difficulty.
Of course, the game itself is barely playable, it randomly stutters when I walk too far away from camp, the character controls are unintuitive, etc. A lot of this stuff could be chipped away by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself, getting a feel for what you want the game to be. That by itself should require a game to take more than a few days, if we expect others to play it and enjoy it. Something simple like movement controls could take many game iterations to iron out, and those aren't hard technical tasks.
Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
> a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans
"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here. As you (and the original author) mentioned, almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries. Almost everything is a copy-paste. The Fable part is linking and debugging until it doesn't crash.
The main value proposition of LLMs is to wash the credit away from the giants and take it for yourself.
I wish we would give credit to Kenney [1] for making sick asset packs, mrdoob for making THREE.js [2], etc. than Fable for running curl/wget...
[1] https://kenney.nl/assets [2] https://threejs.org/
This demo actually kinda blows my mind and makes me want to purse a game idea I had that wanted this exact aesthetic and capability
It gets said ad nauseam but a lot of software development is remixing. Think about how much gaming innovation happened in the Warcraft and StarCraft map editors. The Birth of tower defense, moba, and probably many more.
I've said this before, but LLMs are the next evolution of content consumption.
You no longer need another human to consume content, you just prompt your AI for the dopamine you want in that moment instead!
That’s not how the content addiction works. The social element is a key part of it—the chaotic nature of the pre-chewed content you so willingly and enthusiastically chow down is precisely what makes it addictive.
It remains to be seen how much of that social element is taken over by LLMs as well. There's already plenty of stories about people retreating into LLMs. Whatever shape and form this all ends up, we're just at the beginning, and the only limit will be how economically and socially sustainable it is (chances are: it's not).
If that worked we'd just serve an AI video and say it had 200 million views when it didn't.
<the chaotic nature of the pre-chewed content you so willingly and enthusiastically chow down is precisely what makes it addictive.
LLMs are similarly chaotic, hence why so many have coined them as slot machines.
They are unpredictable, yes, but the social element of said chaos is missing and will never be able to replicated by an autocorrect on steroids. AI just will not replace social media.
I can’t even figure out what to pick from the myriad of streaming services I have. How would I prompt an AI for dopamine fix?
So basically what a normal person is going to do initially?
the difference people typically credit where things come from and not 'look at what the llm did' See how that works?
> See how that works?
Don't get cute.
Now to answer substantially, no frankly unless I'm legally required to I don't credit things. I usually specifically go for licenses that let me do whatever I want. I don't think I've ever credited a library I didn't have to I just use them and make things with them. That's the point of them and no one would raise your point in a pre LLM world imo.
Edit: Like as the point of absurdity no one is thanking the creators of postgres for every project that happens to use postgres. You still made a thing even if you didn't write your database from scratch.
Were you not "[being] cute" yourself? I don't like it, but they did have to goad you into giving some substance.
I didn't intend it that way, but I guess I can see it now. The point they made had not crossed my mind (as evidenced by my response of how I usually make projects, it wouldn't have) So to me the OP was complaining about something I saw as what would be a normal process for like a whole bunch of developers working on normal projects.
Frankly I think this is faux outrage now that a lot of people are getting wise to the fact a substantial amount of modern programming is basically simple pipefitting.
It was always true that the amount of people providing the foundations the rest of us do work on was super tiny and that was just kind of accepted as fact at least from my > 11 years in industry and overall 20+ years of programming now. It's only now that the pipefitting may be devalued are people getting in a tizzy.
Yep, complete “kettle, pot” moment.
I'll own it.
> almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries.
As opposed to when humans get into game dev and roll everything themselves from scratch?
> "Create" is doing a lot of lifting here.
No, it's not.
And assets will be generated soon, too.
Stop downplaying how absolutely fucking magical this is.
We are at an inflection point in civilization.
This is the most amazing time in all of human history.
dude, I don't want to be a hater, but this is a pretty crappy game that barely works. I honest to god could have made this in a week without AI. Is it cool that AI made it in 2 days? Sure, but it's not groundbreaking.
Also, I don't think we're at an inflection point when companies are starting to wisen up to just how much this shit costs.
I have never seen such a hive of negativity and pessimism in my life.
This thinking sand did your job 5x faster. And you could have used the opportunity cost to do other things.
The engineers and artists in this country that are dunking on AI are insane. Asia is openly embracing this tech. They're going to leapfrog us if we keep shooting ourselves in the foot.
I mean many people have seen the same technology multiplier in many other industries too in their life time. And to them calling this an inflection point in humanity and expecting them to either panic or cheer seems crazy. So we automated software tasks and made it faster, welcome to declining wages and marginal improvements to consumers.
Extraordinary cope.
> a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices
Yeah that sounds like WoW retail heh.
Kill 200 boars.
Kill 300 boars.
Kill 250 boars and use this sword.
Kill 251 boars and use this special sword.
I heard about a better sword over there. You have to get past the 200 boars.
Wow, thank you for saving me from the boars. Please take this Boar Bane sword. You should try it out on 200 boars.
Or, as a variation on the theme...
kill 200 brown boars.
kill 300 black boars.
Don’t forget collect 20 brown boar snouts (20 snouts * 0.1 droprate = kill 200 brown boars)
“Boars are attacking the town! Kill 200 to thin the herd.”
“We tried everything to cure the boars, but we couldn’t. If they go any farther, they’ll infect everything. Kill 200 to stop them from infecting the forest.”
“You are inside your own mind. Your fears surround you. Fear of the boar. Free yourself. Kill 200 dream boars.”
Kill 3 boars, 3 spiders, 3 wolves. Forgot to tell you they share spawns so if you don't find any of X, kill Y & Z until X spawns.
:upsidedownface:
Hey! The NPC whos name you already forgot told you where the dream boars spawn! Are you not reading the deep lore this game has on offer!
For every ten kill X quests you get a Mankirk's Wife quest or a Hogger and it all works out great. 80% of almost everything is filler, like our bodies are 70% just water, but it's the taste that matters.
Killing thousands of boars for fun/XP? This is basically ecocide. Shame on WoW for promoting such behaviour.
Boars and their spread as an invasive species is relevant here?
There is no evidence for that. Boars are presumably native to Azeroth, and part of its delicately balanced ecosystem. Other species rely the the boars in various ways, either because they prey on the boars themselves or because they keep other species in check that would become problematic and invasive otherwise.
Don’t forget, “Kill the guy and get the thing, then take that to this other guy.”
You'd be a fool to spend more than 30 seconds on it if you'd played an actual MMO anytime in the last five years. It's immediately apparent how poor quality AI-generated games like this are.
The plans have weekly limits, but are charged monthly. So this is actually only about ~$45.
91% of weekly limit of 20x plan is about 1500 bucks in API equivalent.
> Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
I don't know what that means. I can post something random on social media and there is a chance some person will spend 10 minutes on it. I don't need an LLM nor any money for that effect.
> by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself
> a human would generally spend a lot of time here,
This was always the hard part - game engines, asset libraries and all other services / SDKs were always making code-generation cheaper every generation.
Releasing a bug-free, thoughtfully built product requires a lot of attention and product skill.
Yeah, I feel like nobody realizes you can put together premade/open source game base + assets in a weekend. And before LLMs there were guys who specialized in this and got really popular on social media for "making a game in a weekend".
Always interesting reading threads about topics you know deeply and everyone else has no familiarity or understanding about what they are seeing. Stark reminder of how easy it is to be impressed when you don't understand a topic.
>Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.
Does this excite you?
What is the point of all these projects like this, except to say that you did something? (that you didn't actually do but half-assed a minimally plausible version of, so hey)
It's tale as old as time at this point: the LLM produced something sort of shaped like some other software, and did it in an impressively short amount of time, but it's basically impossible to bring a codebase made in this way up to production standards, or to maintain it in any reasonable way. Nobody's gonna pay money for this, or want to play it instead of Warcraft. Why should anybody care?
it reminds me of no code builders when that was all the rage in like 2018 or so
nobody made anything interesting. all the arr sham was from people trying it out for a month and then realizing it sucks.
coding agents are only really useful in the hands of competent engineers.
there will be these type of projects by tourists that 99% of people will find useless and become throwaway wasteful projects.
hoping to FF to 2029 or whatever to see what’s next.
No-code builders have been through so many cycles... COBOL was one of the first. There's no code involved because it's just English, see!
Ok, this is impressive in terms of gluing things together
Yea it's buggy and janky in places, but equally it's coherent from a 3d perspective and 2d UI one
I don't know how many people have been trying to get claude to vibe code games, but it's really not good at it, I've been fiddling about and trying to make it work for a few months now
Yes, you can make flappy bird or snake level stuff, but anything much bigger honestly just falls over after a while
And that's after lots of prompting and feedback
Now what I'm really interested in here is how much of this was "strongly steered" vs oh that's cool, let's do that, ie trying to "sculpt" and fit an artistic vision of some kind that the driver is envisioning vs liking what it outputs and just asking for more of the same
The distinction between using it as a tool vs just being excited to take whatever it gives you
The other thing I'm wondering is how much of this is strongly indicative of claude's capability with typescript, I personally don't use it, so that might be hampering me more than I realised
This may be an unpopular thing to point out, but to those that are saying it's blindly copying code, I'm pretty sure most of the Wow code on the internet wasn't written in typescript, so there's some transformation going on there, how meaningful it is I'm less that certain about
I'm beginning to feel like I just wasn't ambitious enough[0], I was thinking of this as a good opportunity to see if Fable was capable enough to teach an abstract skill like game design
Though I am happy that the code it's generated so far is actually quite tractable, ie it's been working hard to keep itself maintainable, which honestly is new from my perspective, not sure what other people's experiences have been, but I tend to find that agent's in general are just a bit too willing to increase LOC without enough in the way of features to justify that line count in my mind, it makes the juice just not worth the squeeze in my mind
-[0]: Here's what 45% gets you on a 5x plan (https://github.com/Folcon/inkstain-engine)
> Yea it's buggy and janky in places
Anyone who thinks that this makes it a bad WoW clone has probably not played very much WoW. There have always been lots of weird bugs, and recent expansions have only gotten worse.
I haven't played the newer expansions, but the classic client (v1.12.1 in my case) from ~2006 is a nice piece of software. I've run it on old Pentium 3 clients and modern hardware under Win 11 and Wine and it just works everywhere I fire it up. It handles scaling well (I can play it 4K OLED or 1024x768 CRT), it behaves during alt-tab, and every button/tab/shortcut feels thought out.
Please, let’s not get cute. This isn’t the same thing and you damn well know it.
You have a surprising amount of confidence that they haven't been vibe coding their patches lately
I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.
The term MMO is about the game/server architecture more than the size of the game. MMOs are online games with a single (or sharded) persistent gamestate. That's it.
Most shooters have rounds that restart, breaking the persistence quality of the game. Other games like Minecraft emphasize individual / private servers and break the "single gamestate" proposition. The "Massively" word refers to that single gamestate that many users can interact with, not how many do actually play.
To me, The "play offline" option is more against the MMO definition than the actual number of players.
I'm sure that's a fine take if you decide that "Massively Multiplayer" doesn't mean "Massively Multiplayer".
What would you call it? A small multiplayer online?
"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.
Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
> Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.
So if they weren’t the author you’d be tickety-boo with this smart-ass rude reply? Christ almighty.
What was smart asssed, or rude, about it? That's what those games are called. GoldenEye was multiplayer. Halo 2 was online multiplayer. If you were asking what to call a game that has P2P multiplayer support using webrtc and therefore only supported countable concurrent players, my honest thought would be to call it an online multiplayer game and forget about the "massive" part because it's just not relevant. Even though it is meant to mimic the gameplay of games that happen to be MMOs doesn't mean it needs to adopt the moniker. Final fantasy 12 mimicked the gameplay of MMOs, but it's just a "single player game".
On the contrary, if you're trying to convey to a mass audience that what you have built resembles something else, the best strategy is to reference that thing by its most familiar name.
Sorry if I came off as petty. Was just trying to answer honestly, and realized I didn't have the right context.
Impressive for a few days of Fable time.
And here I am watching my 5-hour window disappear over a couple simple tasks in a CRUD app.
You can generate simple CRUD apps with free plans / old models.
https://www.reddit.com/r/ClaudeAI/comments/1u3m6a8/i_vibe_co...
Repo: https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft
Ha, why is the creator's account banned?
Its reddit side ban not subreddit side so likely spamming en bulk triggered.
other most common reason for a Reddit site ban is posting free Palestine
Everytime i read one of these vibe coded projects i wonder: Is AI capable of building well structured programs? Designs with strong separation of concerns. Clean code. Short, well defined functions.
This is not how I'd design much of this. Does that matter? AI and whatever training data used seems to differ.
I thought one of the tenets of vibe coding was letting go of code quality, perhaps even to the point of not looking at the code?
The lower the code quality and less coherent the design, the poorer the agent will perform over time as the project grows.
Pure vibe coding pretty much limits the max scope of your project to the capability of the agent, and if you're trying to make something real and maintainable, you'll always end up with something worse than the person who guides it at a lower level.
That being said, there are certainly going to be systemic/built in ways to have coding agents generate coherent architectures. Just it isn't really baked in right now.
Probably an ideal model with current tech is the main coding agent thread that implements things, and a secondary thread that constantly compacts/prunes and cleans up according to specific style rules.
Problem with doing both in same context via AGENTS.md is the LLM often won't adhere to all rules if it's overloaded with many competing instructions. But you can scope the code styling agent prompt tightly and get much higher focus and adherence.
That does defeat the claim that AI is intelligent IMO. I should not need to dance with instructions in order for the LLM to behave intelligently.
Yes, you just need to tell it to do that. Before I start I go back and forth talking about the architecture and making design docs. If you start with good bones, things go much better than stepping through adding things and ideas ad hoc.
> Yes, you just need to tell it to do that.
Indeed. All you have to do is say “and make it good”, and it will make it good.
No, you need to tell it the architecture you want. Does anyone really believe you can just say "build the thing" and LLMs will somehow defeat Kolmogorov complexity or that they can read minds? What exactly are you trying to say? They are no good because they aren't magic?
They don't follow basic design principles. If i have to tell the ai every detail of basic design then... Well... I do not consider that very intelligent for a software dev.
I do use AI extensively and get it to spit out vaguely acceptable designs. But I'm doing the design. Even when i have another agent trying to simplify or such the design details are still me.
I don't think people understand how this runs in contrast to the claims of intelligence.
I've built very large structured programs with claude. Talking about the structure is indeed an important part of the exercise. It's also an important factor in success. Context is limited and separation of concerns is an essential part in the LLM being able to do it at all. The chunk of "what needs to be done" needs to be small enough for it to be able to recall and reason about. Bad architecture will result in spinning your wheels constantly changing spaghetti soup that never meets spec.
Building a CAD kernel one of the essential pieces in getting from vaguely working to closing an extremely large number of gaps was some rather strict separation of concerns – without it we were just stuck on perpetual rearchitecting switching from methodology to methodology opening new gaps with each attempt to close others.
Not surprised that it is impossible to play.
> 502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)
hugged to death?
Yeah RIP. Had a few performance issues which we're finding and fixing as we go
> 502 Bad Gateway
> nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)
commenting so I remember to check again later when it's back.
thats sick.
sick.
Creator here — fun to see this show up!
I built this with Fable over a couple of days, on the side. It's a vanilla-WoW-flavoured micro-MMO in the browser: nine classic classes, three zones, a 5-player instanced dungeon, parties/duels/trades, and persistent characters. Free to play: https://worldofclaudecraft.com — and fully open source (MIT):
https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft
Honestly the most mind-blowing part for me was how much it shipped that I never asked for. The level of polish and completeness coming out of the model genuinely surprised me — quest logs, threat metrics in the combat log, eating/drinking, spirit release on death.
We already have some contributors on GitHub!
This is cool! I assume a lot of this was Fable orchestrating sub-agents with cheaper models, right? Something I noticed with Fable is that if it spun off three sub-agents in the cloud version of claude code, and then hit the 5-hour usage limit, all the work of those sub-agents would be lost (!). Did you run into the same thing?
One time though, I hit the limit when not running a sub-agent, and the agent resumed after the limit expired. Weird.
No this was all running on Fable. Used like 93% of my Max plan over the course of 2 days to get the initial version running
Care to share prompts so we can see how involved you were vs how habds off you were able to be?
You did a great job writing a prompt. Congratulations.
Hey. This is a total nightmare in my opinion. The dark mirror of something that I know and love and represents one of the highlights of human digital authorship.
If you'd like to play the actual game with other SWEs I'd invite you to help me start a guild for SWEs: https://unplanned-downtime.com/
I’m on a phone so I can’t see what this does, but it reminded me of this great presentation of a game style agent manager AgentCraft: putting the orc in orchestration https://youtu.be/kR64LOqBBCU?si=d3IS7SVy2lv0hM_A
fwiw, it loads on my (i)phone
I was able to put in a username and password, choose a character and "enter the realm" but then within a second of the game graphics loading it crashes so I can't actually see what the game is about. Since it's called "World of Claudecraft" I thought it might be similar in concept to the AgentCraft video I posted. I still don't know if that's true.
It loads but you can’t interact
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This is so cool. Where did the free assets / character models come from?
You can see the CREDITS.md which has links to the models: https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft/blob/mai...
Claude, add support for Firefox and Mobile views!
hugged to death
Just a hotpatch maintenance window to release The Token Burning Crusade expansion. At this rate we're looking for a true WoC Classic release for the real fans in like a couple weeks.
It's impressive that Fable 5 was able to resynthesise something like this from its training data, but I am really not looking forward to more of this. What's the point?
This is super cool!
I am using some llm work to help me bring my mmo project (2013-present) to prod, but my project is much more about pushing the edge of the mmo technology space, and my strategy has as one of its pillars the importance of owning the IP, which means adhering to the current laws in my production pipeline, so I only use unix/linux philosophy and have the llm do small tiny things in skeleton mode so I can rewrite them enough to claim they are actually mine, which they are. Even though I intend to open source the client fully, and the assets, I have to have the copyright so I can assign it to those licenses.
Technically, according to current SCOTUS rulings and precedent set so far (hopefully better things and changes to come, but here we are), this can not be copyrighted by the person who paid for the compute to make it.
When money starts hitting these kinds of projects, the legal wolves will be soon at the door, and it's going to get messy I think. So I still support open source gaming projects, but pure agentic or vibed games are probably going to face tons of challenges in the not too distant future based on my analysis.
Impressive. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise, I don't see them running a fun little browser MMO.
Some people will see this and think "wow, in 5 more years I'll actually be able to make World of Warcraft". Some will see this and think "Wow, I can make World of Warcraft now with 1/100th the cost and engineers". Neither of these thoughts are right, though. The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".
[1] - roughly $63 million, 5 years, 60 engineers
> The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".
What? Writing code is not the bottleneck for how good a game is
Also your figure about there being 60 engineers on the team that launched WoW is completely incorrect. That was the total size of the team near the end and only about five of those were actual developers. Most of those were artists and other designers. I suggest you read the world of Warcraft development diary book it's actually very good. A lot of the development time went into writing tools to support the artists and designers. The actual amount of time that went into coding the game itself was a very small percentage of the overall time spent on the game
It's all about how a game actually feels which comes down to art, balance, progression, music, gameplay, lore, and so much else where you need people with obsessive levels of detail to perfect. I'm not saying LLMs can't help but it's ridiculous to make claims like this
Well, this is outrageously impressive
Thank you!
The rotation makes me motion-sick
Doesn't seem to work on mobile?
i got a 502
The right-click to attack isn't really friendly to clickpad configurations (like Apple laptops). Still impressive!
Aaand it’s down.
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Is it that they are copying existing stuff, or that success is biased to the attempts at something that has a lot of existing examples to plagiarise?
I would propose that plenty of people are trying to use LLMs to build unique new projects, but without having been exposed to solutions to those problems, the LLMs are far less likely to succeed.