// building in public
Building the survival game I always wanted to play — live in Unreal Engine 5 with Claude driving the editor over MCP, one short clip at a time. New episodes post to YouTube, TikTok, and Instagram, with each entry linking straight to its posts.
I am personifying my agents and having them run a morning standup. They have daily workflows and they depend on each other, so each one holds a contract to deliver something to the next one. I want them to feel responsible to each other, w…
If you have to take your game down for a day, do not tell people it is five hours. Tell them it is an hour and a half, or two. Just be straightforward with them. Clip from the live build stream. WILDREACH is in development and the Steam wi…
One of the guys in the stream is four builds into his own game now. I have been coaching him through it. It is something simple, and something to build from, which is exactly right. Start with an HTML game and work up to full Unreal from t…
I am delegating more because the agents have proven themselves. What I am watching is whether they make the correct decision when they are handed unfamiliar information. While that percentage stays high, they get more freedom, more decisio…
The Claude terminal now suggests its own replies to its own tasks, which is genuinely useful. I still do not go full YOLO. Approving each step might be annoying but at this point it is the safety mechanism. Some people let it run unattende…
The advice I keep giving myself is to keep it small and keep it simple. I get on tangents on stream and talk about all the scope I want to add to the game. I would love to add it, and I might if that is where the direction heads. But I kee…
I want to localize all my models. The plan is to take the scaffolding I have built across my games and LoRA train my own models on it, then run those local models under Claude's supervision. If I get it right, I think each game genre can e…
What I love is that a lot of Nintendo games, including modern ones, ship with no patch at all. I bought one recently, put the cartridge in, and sat there waiting for the update. There was no update. It just played. The fact that I noticed…
The fun thing about AI right now is that you can brainstorm and build at the same time, and the fidelity of what you can produce in real time keeps going up. There will always be a reason to spend a long time on something to get it exactly…
In Unreal, editing a placed instance only edits that instance. You have to go into the blueprint itself, or nothing you place afterwards picks up the change. This got frustrating with Claude, because it would tell me something was done, I…
An agent means it has the ability to take action and decide based on a set of parameters. It is not binary, do this or do that. It is thresholding, with a little more subjectivity and a little more freedom. My newsroom is the example. Ever…
I wanted Zelda style puzzles in the dungeons, and nothing is more Zelda than shooting a fire arrow to light a torch. It took a couple of quick additions because we were already in that part of the code. That is why I build this way. When y…
Where I actually sit on this. I am a lifelong learner, so I want to do everything myself eventually. Until then I fill my gaps with AI and I learn from it while it works. I ask what the best way to do this is, so that next time I can do it…
That is the actual order of operations, and the middle step is the one people leave out when they describe their process. I get something to a known working model first, then I optimize it. I cannot optimize an idea. Today that meant admit…
Claude gets to the point where it starts chasing its tail, the same way humans do when you cannot see the forest for the trees. You get super dug into one specific task and lose the thread of what you were solving. The job at that point is…
The line between using AI and handing it the wheel. I let Claude do a lot of what I would call grunt work: flipping the switches, updating configurations, running the passes I already know I want. But I have to understand the logic. I am n…
The clearest way I can describe where a human still beats the model. Claude does not want to assume too much, which makes it thorough and also makes it slow to commit. It will not trust its gut, because it does not have one. Once you have…
Planting stopped working and the plot highlighting went with it. Watched it fail a few times, then found it. I had required a hoe to be equipped and actually out in your hand before any of those functions would fire. Every one of them. So…
A small piece of procedural logic that made the world look right. The generation only applies foliage where the surface is smooth, so anything at a steep angle stays bare: cliffs, shears, the faces where grass will not grow. So the rule be…
A mesh was floating on top of all the other meshes, so I asked about it. The answer came back that we already fixed that, we just never ran the fix. All right buddy, run the fix. If you have paired with an AI on anything for more than a we…
Sharing one machine with the model is the part of the MCP workflow that grates. Claude expected the editor to be in the other map, I switched it, and that alone threw it off. If I had way more money I would stand up a second box and let Cl…
I was certain the ground foliage was killing my frame rate. I had the fix lined up. Then I read the profiler and the ground plants were not what was hurting me at all. The GPU was sitting idle for more than half of every frame while the ga…
Part three of the boat saga. The boat in WILDREACH rides on the animal mechanic, so it inherits everything an animal has. It kept fleeing from me all session, and I could not test it because it would not hold still. Then I found the settin…
Three console commands in a row, none of them real. Go fish, go fish, this is not a command. As smart as Claude is, it sometimes reaches for Unity syntax while sitting inside Unreal, and you get a small pile of confidently wrong commands.…
The best prompt is not an order, it is a question. Where people get into trouble with AI is knowing enough to be dangerous: they get too specific and command, "Claude, do this." Flip it. Say what you want and ask for the best way to do it.…
The boat actually fled from me on stream. Yesterday I explained that the boat in WILDREACH rides through the animal mechanic, and joked about how insane it would be if it kept the spook-and-flee behavior. Today I walked up to test it and t…
The danger of working with AI: it cannot read your mind. Claude did the hard part of the crafting menu and got the item pictures in place, but in my head those images were going to be big, full-size buttons. I never said that, so it did no…
Farming in WILDREACH just got one button. Tilled land finally renders with raised bumps instead of showing flat, and every farm interaction now runs through a single context-sensitive E key. Claude is finishing the conversion from the old…
Two data points and Claude did the rest of the math. The fishing pole kept equipping at the wrong angle because assets from Blender, Fab, and Maya all arrive with different XYZ orientations. Instead of eyeballing rotations for an hour, I g…
The crafting menu used to attack you. In the first pass, walking up to the workbench auto-popped the menu, and that caused all kinds of bugs. Now it is an explicit press: hit E to craft, plus proper feedback when you actually make somethin…
The theme under WILDREACH is the hubris of man: thinking we know better than nature. The earth and evolution are just the best practices for life, the best that life has come up with after years and years of iterative process. To believe y…
Just start building. A viewer shipped his first HTML game after following along with the stream, and this is the advice that got him there: hand Claude or any of the current models a small idea and let it start building. An HTML game is th…
Come at AI with a learner's mindset and it is the best coach you could ever have. Come at it with "do all the work for me" and it will only get you so far. Progress in game dev is the jagged line as always, but it is a lot less jagged than…
Noon, dusk, midnight, on demand. The planetarium system in WILDREACH now records the in-game day and time, and the debug controls can jump the sky to any hour. Watching it snap from noon to dusk to midnight on the first test earned an hone…
One Claude session critiques the next one's work, and it is the funniest part of my workflow. Working in this repo, Claude has picked up a rhythm: when a session nears its context limit, it stops, writes a handoff summary, and starts fresh…
I forked my idle cult game and turned it into SimTower. The original was built for Will, based on the Cult Empire game he likes. But I love the tower-sim genre and really wanted to play SimTower again, so a fork later, the cult now runs a…
Tree chopping in WILDREACH should feel like honest work. The Valheim model is the reference: chop the tree, it breaks into logs, logs break into planks, and unlocking the knowledge plus the tooling for flat two-by-fours opens up new build…
The horses have knees now. Every animal in WILDREACH used to glide around flat, walking on planes with frozen legs. This update wired IK into the wildlife, so each leg articulates on its own. The tour: horses stepping properly, a cow sprin…
Blender molds the clay. Unreal adds the life. That is the cleanest way I have found to split animation work between the two tools. In Blender you are reshaping the paper doll itself. In Unreal you pose it, anchor a grip to a fishing reel,…
The boat in my survival game is technically an animal now. WILDREACH already had a mechanic for riding animals, so instead of building a boat system from scratch I made the boat one of the animals and disabled everything else: eating, wand…
Claude and I were looking at the same animation setup and seeing different things, so I made it prove its answer. I wanted evidence that the male and female characters use separate animations before touching anything. Claude checked, came…
What if fireflies were your village lights? A stream chat idea grew legs live: swarms of luminescent bugs as a lighting element, unique extra-bright classes of them, attracted to certain types of plants, so you light your village by planti…
Crouch finally works and it made my whole morning. This is the unfiltered two minutes after a fix lands: the animation blend space had been fighting me, then it just worked, and it looked good. The funny part is how small the change was co…
WILDREACH's final assets are getting a Mad Max, Fallout, improvised, upcycled feel. Survival gear should look like it was scavenged and rebuilt, not bought. And one idea that fits the world: something in the environment standing as a warni…
Most of this series is me and Claude building the survival game together. Not today. The mountain background needed hand-eye judgment, not a prompt, so I sculpted the terrain and placed the mountain meshes myself, the old fashioned way. Sp…
I'm not actually going to use Claude for this one. Day 16 of building the survival game, and the mountain background needed hand-eye judgment, not a prompt, so I sculpted the terrain and placed the meshes myself, old fashioned way. Sped th…
Unreal's PCG system handles the procedural stuff, the tree density, the bush spread, the rock scatter along the shoreline. None of that is Claude. What Claude did build is the parameter rig on top of it, easy to wire up, hard to mess up, a…
Wiring aimed gunplay into the zombie survival game, with an AI-built rigging tool doing the heavy lifting.
I just put out a video saying you should be building your own tools, and this is that lesson in the wild. AI kept botching the shoulder pivot on the new gun rig. It was not going to get there by prompting harder. So I had it build me a rig…
The gun finally aims where you shoot. Before this, the character had a static sprite that flipped left and right while bullets flew wherever you pointed. Now the arm wraps all the way around and tracks your aim, on every gun in the game. B…
A walkthrough of NanoFormers, the newest game in the PickBits Arcade — charge beam, dash, a full roster of unlockable boss powers, and power-gated backtracking.
When you're building a game with AI, don't just build the game. Build in the capacity to fine-tune it. For NanoFormers, that meant building our own level editor.
A narrator now calls out every power-up as you grab it. Ten minutes to wire in, and suddenly every pickup feels like an event instead of a stat bump.
While putting the finishing touches on the Steel Phoenix release for Google Play, I felt it was missing something. So I borrowed a trick from the zombie survival game: a narrator who calls out your power-ups as you grab them.
Smoothing Meadow Park's jagged terrain by hand and carving a better river, then handing the asset configs to Claude to move over — everything but the rivers.
Day 15 of building the survival game I always wanted to play using Unreal and Claude. Went back into Meadow Park to resculpt some rough areas — smoothing out the jagged terrain instead of the harsher cut-in look from before. Smooth is too…
First look at Zombie Survival, a hands-off vampire-survivors-style shooter — it shoots on its own, you steer, and dodging is the name of the game.
A proper showcase of the first two weeks: sneaking past wildlife with the new hearing-range mechanic, a build menu, a full farming loop, gathering, and a summit view of both biomes.
Day 14. Two weeks into building this survival game with Claude in Unreal, so I recorded a proper feature showcase instead of a single fix.
First two weeks of building this survival game with Claude in Unreal, so I recorded a proper feature showcase.
A new hotkey bar, equipping the hoe, and placing tilled land — plus a height bug to squash so the patches sit flush anywhere on the map.
Day 13. Quick update: tilling and farming, tested at a demo level so it loads fast.
The equipped axe just floated next to the character's hand, so Claude compared the static mesh orientation to a known-good one and fixed it. Next cut: chopping trees into the inventory.
I went to equip the axe and it just floated there next to my guy's hand. I farted around trying to place it right, got close but never there. So I handed it to Claude.
The Meadows biome is roughed in — grass, trees, and a river through the valley that still bulges up over the terrain. Some ground to sink before it sits right.
Day 12 of building the survival game I always wanted to play, and the Meadows biome is roughed in. Grass, trees, and a river running through the valley. The water does not quite fit yet. It bulges up over the terrain, so I have some ground…
Claude cooked two full biomes overnight: forest and meadows, around 180,000 procedural instances, a farming unlock tied to a discovery POI, and a persistent discovery map.
Claude cooked two full biomes overnight. I woke up, jumped in the editor, and took a ride around to see what happened.
Dragging the follow camera closer and higher while the game keeps running — the live-edit loop that makes the whole build move as fast as it does.
You can tune the camera while the game is still running. That is the part of building in Unreal I keep coming back to. Leave the game playing, hop over to the editor, drag the follow camera closer and higher, and watch it update on the cha…
The trees were all growing sideways. One property fixed it.
Items get hover tooltips pulling real data from a Claude-populated struct, with live item counts — fiddly menu plumbing, happily handed off.
Inventory menu day on Wildreach. Each item now has a hover tooltip, and the data behind it is real, not placeholder. The tooltip pulls from a struct that Claude populated, and the item counts are live too. Hover an item, see what it is and…
The full loop lands: till the soil, plant a seed, water it, harvest, and replant from the seeds you get back. Cooking is next, and it feeds straight into survival.
Farming day on Wildreach. There's a new tilled land type you create, and once it's down you walk up to the plants and harvest them. The loop is the simple one you want: till the soil, plant a seed, water it, and the crop grows on its own c…
Main menu with character select, a HUD showing real stats instead of placeholder A's, and resizable build and character menus with categories.
Menus day on Wildreach. The main menu is in, with a settings screen where you pick male or female before you load. The HUD got fixed too: health and resources now pull real values straight from the game systems instead of the placeholder A…
Claude wires the health and stamina bars into existing systems and starts the build menu: a live preview environment and slots for every craftable item.
Build day on the survival game. I let Claude wire the health and stamina bars into the mechanics I already had, then start on the build menu: a live preview environment and slots for every craftable item. Still pre-alpha, but it came toget…
Quick one for the Claude users following the build. The MCP calls I use to drive Unreal are chatty and the payloads are big, which clutters the main agent's context fast. So I set up a skill and a rule that route those calls through a suba…
The herd gets a brain: animals roam and herd on their own, bunch up and bolt when spooked, and you hunt them with the bow or go hungry.
Gave the herd a brain today. The animals roam and herd on their own, and if you sneak up wrong they bunch into a tight crowd and bolt. Land the bow shot or go hungry. Next pass is them charging back at you.
I promised hunting, so here's the bow with its arc. Lined up the test animals, spared the fun ones, and took a deer for food. That's the food loop starting to come together in the survival game.
Added a batch of farm animals to the level today, a hog, a sheep, and a dog, then had Claude scale the horse-mounting mechanic I built earlier to all of them. So now you can ride pretty much anything, including the iguana. The first mount…
The mounted horse works and the bow fires — rough around the edges, but the survival game is starting to feel real.
Quick one. The mounted horse works, the bow fires, and now I have an aiming situation to sort out. Rough around the edges, but the survival game is starting to feel real. Getting close.
The first deer roam the survival world. They don't run from the player yet — that fear behavior is the next thing going in.
Rode out and found the first deer roaming the survival world. Put the sword away and just watched them for a second. Handsome boys. They don't run from me yet, but that fear behavior is the next thing I'm building in.
A lap around the early world: stone houses, cabins, open landscape, and a character who can actually run through all of it.
No commentary, just a walk up to the castle that now sits in the survival world. Stone walls, a gated keep, towers. The map is starting to have landmarks worth walking toward.
No commentary today, just a lap around the survival world as it comes together. Stone houses, a few cabins, trees, open landscape, and a character who can actually run through all of it. Early, but it's a real place now.
