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ksaunHNSource author
Lessons learnedExperience excerpt · English

I was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG)

I was an experienced game designer and producer (mostly RTS and narrative RPG). Some years ago, my career was derailed by major health developments. Since then, I haven't been able to work as I once did and didn't expect I'd be able to meaningfully contribute to a game again. A few months ago, A colleague encouraged me to experiment with Claude Code. So now I have a little game project. Being unfamiliar with genAI, I chose something modest so that I'd more likely be able to push it to a fairly polished state. It's a single player 2D strategy game with some narrative, meta progression, and a card minigame. It's set in the near future. You are using software (the game) to navigate a person's digitized mind, reading their memories. I hope to have a playable demo within the next month or so.

Original discussionAsk HN: What Are You Working On? (July 2026)1,154 source comments · at import
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DA
david927HN

What are you working on? Any new ideas that you're thinking about?

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guiambrosHN

Big fan of SW:KOTOR series. Would love to test Vestiges when ready. You should consider creating the game on Steam, so you can start building your audience.

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phaserHN

For all the bad rap that AI gets in game development, stories like this should be heard more. I occasionally get tendinitis and I can't code for the entire day like when I was young. I get some relief dictating to the AI when I need to rest my hands. I can imagine it's a much bigger help for someone who is struggling with worse.

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marknutterHN

This an inspirational comment, thanks for posting it! I love that more and more people are being enabled (or re-enabled in your case) as software developers thanks to ai.

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zandermaxHN

I am also interested in trying this game out! And I'm really glad to hear how agentic coding got you back in the game (literally)!

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zahlmanHN

Glad to hear. I could say I'm in a similar position actually, but my setbacks have been more psychological.

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andaiHN

I'd like to hear more about your experience using AI for game development. I've had a strangely asymmetric experience where frontier models are failing apparently basic tasks like making changes to a Pong clone without breaking it, while the same models are successfully designing and implementing multiplayer servers with rollback netcode! I think it has to do with what they can and cannot verify (i.e. they can't actually play pong to see if they broke it), but I'm not sure. (Also happy to hear anyone else's experiences on this matter!)

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I4cTimeHN

I've always wanted to make a game but never chased that down as I took a different career path. I seen unreal is coming out with an mcp type thing which got me thinking about looking into trying. I liked the old Thief games and would like to make something along those lines but with a different flavor. Sounds like a fun game. Keep us Posted :)

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k_devHN

May the force be with you. In all seriousness, can you document your journey? I always wanted to get into building games, that is what got me into software engineering but never took the time to build any game apart from few projects back in my uni days

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