AI game development
AI Game Development
I've shipped 77 build videos doing this. What follows is the workflow that keeps the AI useful past the first prompt — and the resources I lean on every time.
When I first started building games with Claude Code, the first 80% felt like magic. Then I'd hit feel, polish, the asset pipeline, mobile builds — and every generic AI workflow fell apart. That's the part nobody clips for the timeline.
What actually works isn't a clever prompt. It's a stack: a domain skill the agent loads first (phaser-gamedev, threejs-builder, retro-diffusion), a working repo to anchor to, and tight feature passes you can play after every change. The pack is the same skills, repos, and prompts I use on camera — packaged so you don't have to reverse-engineer them from the videos.
Why It Matters
- Agent skills I actually use on camera: phaser-gamedev, threejs-builder, threejs-capacitor-ios, retro-diffusion, animated-spritesheets, gamedev-assets, playwright-testing
- Full source for the games in the showcase — Phaser Oakwoods, Castle Clash Duel, Forest Census, the pirate brawler
- Articles on the parts that took me longest: walk-cycle generation, comparing four AI video models for sprites, the import pipeline that mattered more than the model
Workflow
Load the skill before the prompt
phaser-gamedev knows scene lifecycles. threejs-builder knows renderers and animation loops. retro-diffusion knows how to keep a sprite consistent across frames. Loading the right one first is the single biggest unlock.
Fork a working repo — don't start blank
Phaser Oakwoods for platformers. Castle Clash Duel for tactics. Forest Census for a tiny Three.js scene. The agent imitates whatever architecture it's looking at, so give it a good one.
Iterate by playing, not by reading diffs
After every pass, run the game. If the movement feels wrong, describe the visible problem — 'the pirate slides on attack frames' — before asking for the next change. Green tests aren't the same as fun.
Public Vault Excerpts
Agent skill
phaser-gamedev
A Phaser 3 workflow skill for scenes, sprites, Arcade and Matter physics, tilemaps, animation, input, and game architecture. Use it when a browser game needs real game-loop structure instead of generic React-style code.
- Phaser
- 2D
- Browser games
Agent skill
threejs-builder
A Three.js skill for scene setup, camera and renderer wiring, lighting, geometry, materials, animation loops, GLTF loading, responsive rendering, and performance guardrails.
- Three.js
- 3D
- WebGL
Project
Castle Clash Duel
A public Phaser 3 tactical strategy game using Tiny Swords pixel art. The useful lesson is not only the source code: it is the turn-based combat loop, sprite animation handling, and AI-assisted iteration pattern behind the build.
- Phaser
- Strategy
- Pixel art
Project
Forest Census
A public Three.js mini-game built with Codex CLI and the threejs-builder skill. It is a compact example of a single-scene game that can be hosted statically and improved in small AI-assisted passes.
- Codex
- Three.js
- Mini-game
Agent skill
retro-diffusion
A pixel-art generation workflow for spritesheets, img2img edits, walk cycles, idle loops, attack sheets, and animation consistency from reference images.
- Pixel art
- Spritesheets
- Animation
Agent skill
animated-spritesheets
A workflow for turning a single character reference into an animated spritesheet through frame recovery, background cleanup, normalization, contact sheets, and GIF previews.
- Characters
- Motion
- Pipeline
Playbook
The Full AI Sprite Pipeline
A public-facing playbook path from image generation to video reference to a Phaser test harness, showing how game-ready character sprites come from a repeatable pipeline rather than one lucky prompt.
- GPT Image
- Sora
- Phaser
Agent skill
threejs-capacitor-ios
A workflow for shipping Three.js games through Capacitor iOS, covering Vite builds, GLTF loading, mobile controls, OrbitControls mapping, sync, and iOS run troubleshooting.
- Three.js
- Capacitor
- iOS
Project
Three.js + Capacitor Mobile Agent Skills
A public reference repo for Three.js scene building, GLTF loading, and Capacitor iOS deployment. Useful when a web game needs to become a mobile build.
- Mobile
- 3D
- Reference repo
Prompt Patterns
Get to a playable loop before anything else
Before adding levels, content, or art, get one playable minute working. Movement, one interaction, one way to win or lose. Use the existing engine conventions in this repo — don't reinvent scene structure. Add a small debug overlay for anything I'll need to tune (speeds, hitboxes, spawn rates).
One system per pass
Change only one system. Tell me: what the current behaviour is, what we're aiming for, which files you expect to touch, and how I can see the difference in the running game. If you find yourself wanting to touch a second system, stop and ask first.
Frequently Asked Questions
Is this actually good enough to ship something I'd publish?
For indie scope, yes. The Pirate Survival Beat 'Em Up I built went from a blank Phaser 4 starter to a full brawler — combat, audio, screen shake, Fibonacci difficulty ramp — in 17 focused prompts. The constraint is scope, not capability. Keep your first version one screen, one loop, one win condition, and you'll finish it.
What's the most common way people get stuck?
Asking for the whole game in one prompt, or treating asset generation as a side quest. Most builds I see fail at the sprite import pipeline, not the model output — there's a whole article in the pack about the two days I lost to a walk cycle that was actually a registration bug.
How is this different from a course or tutorial series?
I'm not selling lessons. I'm selling the actual files — the .md skills Claude Code or Codex loads, the repos I forked from, the prompts I ran. The YouTube walkthroughs are free; the artifacts are what let you skip the trial-and-error.