This thread is for anyone working on personal projects to share their progress, and hold themselves somewhat accountable to a group of peers.
Post your project, your progress from last week, and what you hope to accomplish this week.
If you want to be pinged with a reminder asking about your project, let me know, and I'll harass you each week until you cancel the service.
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Notes -
I abandoned/paused my last attempt at coding my own videogame since I got bogged down in tons of pedantic technical details until I lost motivation for a few months. I am self taught at programming and have to look up every little feature if I've never used it before and it's annoying.
I heard some people talking about Vibe coding, making the entire thing without writing any code yourself, and figured I'd give it a try. I'm working with Google Gemini free tier, and it seems okay so far. The idea being I'm doing all of the actual game design decisions but it can implement them way faster than I can with approximately the same number of bugs (which in turn it can fix when I point them out). I am very impressed with its ability to make a workable prototype near instantly and put a bunch of placeholder stuff so I can test things bit by bit while having background stuff functioning, but am worried that its performance will degrade as the code increases. Has anyone else tried Vibe coding? Any recommendations?
(If it matters, the game is an Idle game somewhat similar to Increlution, so doesn't have fancy graphics or physics or stuff, and is mostly clicking on buttons in various menus)
Fun! Vibe coded game development has gotten better and better over the last few months. It sounds like you're fairly new to coding with AI (forgive me if I'm off the mark with that guess).
This article has a good showcase of what the top-tier model(s) from Anthropic/OpenAI can pull off: What it feels like to work with Mythos
In your case, I'd recommend just watching the video at the top of the blog post, with the following in mind:
With that out of the way; the free google models are a great starting point, and I'm sure you'll be impressed at how fast & precise the outputs are. That said, there's a significant difference in capabilities between the free versions of the models & the frontier (best at the time) versions, especially when you pair those frontier models with coding "agents" (software that allows for fast, targeted control of your personal machine).
For the time being, stick with the free models. Have fun, try crazy stuff, see what works & what doesn't. If you notice that the outputs aren't coming out how you'd hoped, sink a few hours into some youtube tutorials. I'm sure there are great independent creators, but there's just so much noise that I tend to just default to the easiest route - videos from the AI labs themselves. This one looks fine: Prompting 101: Code w/ Claude
You'll squeeze more juice out of the free models if you use the techniques described in the video, but eventually you'll get fed up with the mistakes that gemini is making. At that point, it's probably worth spending $20 to get a subscription to one of the top labs. I'm partial to anthropic & claude, but that's probably just because I use it so much through work.
Good luck!
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Neat! I've been burning my excess tokens from claude's $20 tier trying to vibecode my own videogame. I want to make a naval warfare sim sorta like Rule the Waves but in the modern era. I have minimal coding experience (I don't know how to use github) and have basically just been feeding claude prompts and letting it sort things out.
So far the going has been good, if a bit slow. I tend to burn through the 5-hour limit within an hourish using opus on medium thinking, with about 3-4 hours every week dedicated to this for the last 2-ish months. The sim needs to run on a mac, so I've spent a lot of tokens telling claude to plan the architecture and look for optimizations, which, to my amateur analysis, has been reasonably successful. The latest version is 47k lines of typescript (is this good? bad? I don't know :) ). Theres ships with different modules, planes, doctrines, missiles of various types, and intercept programming, as well as reasonably(I believe) accurate modelling of radar and flight performance.
I've tried using Sonnet to code, and it works surprising well for things which don't require too much forethought, like "make a model and loadout for an arleigh burke destroyer". It's not so great at things like "The tomahawk missiles keep falling into the sea after launch, find out why and fix it", where it tends to get fixated on one aspect or metric and ignoring others. In the latter case, the launch booster didn't have enough thrust, but it kept trying smudge the lift surface size to get the missiles to fly without it. As a whole, I've found that using Opus (and fable, for the brief moments it was available) lead to net faster progress and implementation of systems I wanted, with at least an order of magnitude less mistakes. A few weeks ago I migrated from a browser interface to electron I believe and Opus made the switch painlessly while I'm sure Sonnet would have fumbled.
I'm decently happy with the current program: ships follow orders, missiles fly, some are intercepted, theres cool sprays of CIWS and 5 inch guns when cruise missiles get to close, and airplanes are mostly capable of launching standoff munitions and doing air combat. That beiing said, it's pretty rough on the edges, theres no main menu or situation setup: I have to add ships/planes via lines of code if I want them in the simulation.
If anyone with experience wants to check it out I'll happily post the code to github. I'd love feedback, I'm sure the llms have missed some big things, somewhere, but I'm to dumb to ask the right questions.
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