Mar 18, 2025●14 reads●MIT License

Using LLM's for game design and coding without the skills

Asteroids-gameplay

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!)

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)

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.