Asteroids - a space shooter game created with AI assistance

This game was my third project featuring Claude 3.5 Sonnet creating the bulk of the code. Current features

• Newtonian physics
• Splitting asteroids
• Additional UFO, Comet and Magnetic Mine enemy types
• Unique Boss fights every 5 levels
• 20 levels total of increasing difficulty
• Powerups collected from destroyed asteroids
• All in-game graphics are generated with python/pygame vector drawing capabilities. The uses zero assets (graphics or sfx).
• Quite awful beep boop sfx which can luckily be turned off (there's no sound in space after all...)
• But there is a simple music composer tool which enables creation of melodies to use in-game. 🎶
• Cheats to enable easy testing (you need to read the source to learn them!)
  

Play the game on Windows

https://github.com/jussinrepo/asteroids/blob/main/builds/Asteroids-v1.4.exe

Access the full source code via Github

https://github.com/jussinrepo/asteroids

The project - coding without skill and depending on AI

• Spent about 4 weeks for now, around 0-2 hours per day, total estimate around 40 hours
• Tools used: Claude 3.5 Sonnet (coding, debugging code and idea pitching), Sublime Text 3 (first) and Visual Studio Code (later), PowerPoint (graphic design), python and pygame libraries
• Cost: $0, since you can use all the tools (Claude included!) for free
• Workflow: prompt, implement, test, ask for fixes, iterate, sleep 🔁
• Learned a lot about Python (previously coded with it over 15 years ago, so started with no knowledge)
  

Game development with AI - pros and cons

• You can really start without knowledge, Claude 3.5 Sonnet produces quality code
• ...but you need to be interested in learning the code, otherwise it'll hit a wall soon
• Claude can refactor old scripts simply by drag-n-dropping a py file
• ...but you will soon hit the limit of it's context window
• Claude's Artefacts is REALLY cool feature
• ...but it consumes valuable context window, so turned it off midway of project
• Splitting the code to several smaller files is necessary (to make code fit into the context window)
• ...but Claude can help you with that, when asked
  In short, the context window length is the most limiting and slowing down aspect of gamedev with Claude. Overcoming that is a pain.
  

Few examples of prompting with Claude