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.
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.
“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.”
> 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.
>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.
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.
"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 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?
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.
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.
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.
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’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.
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".
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.
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.
"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/
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.
You no longer need another human to consume content, you just prompt your AI for the dopamine you want in that moment instead!
As opposed to when humans get into game dev and roll everything themselves from scratch?
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.
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.
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.
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.
kill 200 brown boars.
kill 300 black boars.
“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.”
:upsidedownface:
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.
> 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.
Does this excite you?
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)
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.
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.
And here I am watching my 5-hour window disappear over a couple simple tasks in a CRUD app.
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?
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.
Repo: https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft
This is not how I'd design much of this. Does that matter? AI and whatever training data used seems to differ.
Indeed. All you have to do is say “and make it good”, and it will make it good.
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.
hugged to death?
> nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)
commenting so I remember to check again later when it's back.
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!
One time though, I hit the limit when not running a sub-agent, and the agent resumed after the limit expired. Weird.
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
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.