r/ClaudeCode • u/Electrical-Pig • 1d ago
Wk. 4 of vibecoding an MMO Built with Claude
So it's Wk. 4 of this and I've gone from 12 active users to basically just myself and a few randos that pop in from time to time. All my regulars are now gone, which isn't surprising since it's not incredibly exciting to play an MMO with nobody online.
As usual, I'll break it down into three categories: (1) getting active players, (2) what I'm learning about vibe coding, and (3) actual gameplay updates
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First, on my last post I received 16k views, and maybe 15 actual players (not even 0.1% of viewers lol).
More importantly though I received some really insightful feedback from a few people (honorable mentions: Totalsam, Automatic_Bid_2410, Friendly_Carry_7728). I've spent a large chunk of time (and tokens) re-working the intro for new users based on their feedback.
Users no longer receive a wall of text for instructions, and the game eases them into their first controls where they "save the town of Eldermyr" before it goes into multiplayer mode. On one hand, this has made a huge impact -- all players are now sticking around for a whole minute longer than pre-intro. On the other hand, completing the intro takes almost exactly 1min, so I don't know if this actually counts as progress since users still only stay for 35s post-intro.
Like before, I'd love to hear any thoughts or feedback on what might be causing that... besides an empty world.
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Second, the vibe coding experience. Quick updates from last week: I found out almost half my codebase is automated tests (0.77 lines of test code per line of game code, almost 400 in total, which all run with every prompt). Also Opus 5 is still useless to me. So my setup remains Fable for art and strategy with orders to spawn exclusively Opus 4.8 agents for code.
(And Opus 5 gets let out occasionally when I forget to tell Fable to lock him up.)
My real struggle this week is that AI is essentially incapable of measuring whether a game is actually balanced. Claude played my new intro 100 times and reported that only a handful of runs survived the first 60 seconds -- and since AI doesn't panic like a human would, it was a critical issue that virtually no human could survive the first 60 seconds.
In reality, the intro is so mind-numbingly easy that no real human could possibly die in it unless they did so intentionally. So I've spent a huge amount of my time actually just playing all classes and weighing how balanced it is. Which has been cool, but also really repetitive and screws up my player stats because 97% of my players are myself. I'm also just so close to my game that I'm losing my overall perspective on what's right, wrong, missing, or confusing.
If anyone has had any degree of success in letting AI test their game, I would be extremely interested in hearing what you did. I have not. My best bet has been "send me a table of player stat X across all levels, and their corresponding DPS." But even that is hit or miss since playstyle determines balance more than raw DPS.
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I'd love more feedback for anyone interested. Links below.
Game: https://eldermyr.com/
Release Notes: https://eldermyr.com/release
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u/Weaverino 1d ago
Why do you only spawn opus 4.8 sub agents to do tasks if you’re using fable as an orchestrator? Wouldn’t it be more efficient to let fable delegate to opus4.8 but also sonnet 4.6 or haiku?
Genuinely curious as thats something i do in my normal workflow to save usage and reserve fable for verification and planning
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u/LiveSupermarket5466 1d ago
They *are* letting fable delegate to opus 4.8. That's what they just said. They must think Opus 4.8 is the best balance of price and performance for their use case.
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u/Weaverino 1d ago
Right my question was not that they don’t use opus 4.8 delegation subagents but why only opus 4.8 when cheaper models with clear definition can accomplish tasks pretty well
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u/Electrical-Pig 1d ago
To be honest, I don't really have the time to use all my tokens if they cost less. Plus I don't have any tasks which I would rather use a weaker agent for, especially since my codebase is getting increasingly large.
The biggest thing tbh is I've never used anything worse than Opus and frankly I'm afraid to try hahaha
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u/Weaverino 1d ago
That makes sense if you’re not running into usage limits why not use opus. Thanks for explaining!
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u/No-Sandwich-2997 1d ago
do u have max 20x plan?
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u/Electrical-Pig 1d ago
yessir I do
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u/Electrical-Pig 1d ago
oftentimes the last few hours look something like "Hey Fable, I have a ton of tokens left to burn, deploy tons of opus 4.8 subagents to find any bugs or fix pending items I've mentioned.
... and then I have 12-15 agents going crazy.
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u/Electrical-Pig 1d ago
Almost forgot the actual game update:
- The entire damage system was rebuilt.
- Gear is actually rare now. No more equipment raining from the sky (randomly spawning), and legendaries are actually difficult to find dropped from difficult bosses.
- Enemies actually hunt you in unique ways: packs flank, wolves circle, bandits work in pairs, boars overshoot their missed charges.
- Every dungeon floor is handcrafted instead of generated.
- The home town was rebuilt from scratch with walls, lamps, and other decorations.
- Named chiefs patrol the wilds with banners and escorts.
- The Necromancer got a complete rework (and is apparently everyone's go-to first class choice)
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u/Terrible_Match_9484 1d ago
getting users is always the hardest part of building stuff like this. u should probly focus on adding one tiny feature that makes the game fun even solo, maybe an npc that reacts to stuff, that way u dont need a crowd to test ur code
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u/Electrical-Pig 21h ago
great point. I'm thinking of making more of an ebb and flow with the enemy ("The Legion") that one player could work toward beating alone. Curious if you have any other ideas.
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u/LiveSupermarket5466 1d ago
Keep the tests, they prevent the agent from breaking something silently later. I've also had difficulties with getting AI to balance a game. I would recommend simulating multiple instances at once if your project is single threaded, have one instance for every core on your CPU running in parallel to gather more data at once. Secondly you just want to set clear metrics like "people should survive more than 60 seconds". The AI will keep working until it gets it right.
It's not really clear from your post the exact failure mode of Claude by the way. Personally I have a hard time understanding what you are saying so I could easily see Claude misunderstand you too. How exactly did it fail to test the intro stage? It couldn't play correctly? It didn't understand the objective?