Making a Unity Game with Claude AI in Two Hours

or how AI is making gamedev hella easy.

This year I took a break from working on gamedev, I haven’t touched Unity since January when I last worked on ShipVipers. Work and family and life just got a little too busy for me to keep grinding like I was.

Recently, Valve released their Steam Frame VR headset and I was lucky enough to get on the list. This got me all fired up again. A Quest-like headset with slightly better specs and way better focus on games? Sign me up!

..and sign me up I did! To the Steam Developer platform. ShipVipers is definitely going to be a Steam Frame game! (say that three times fast)

Now, as a professional web developer, I’ve been using Claude and Codex (and almost any other LLM you can think of) to help me with my day to day work. I used it in Unity a few times a year ago, but it wasn’t the best experience.

Every AI update is monumental, so I thought I’d give it another whirl. I installed the latest Unity, which now has an awesome new CLI specifically to help agents out! Then I fired up a new project and committed it as a starting point.

the idea

You can’t go into building something blindly, so the first step was to think about what I wanted to build.

I’ve been writing a futuristic short story and when I thought about it, for some reason, the NES Classic game Bionic Commando popped into my head.

Bionic Commando gif

So I went into Claude and had it create a plan for how to create such a game. I used a claude skill I created called Code Mentor which creates nice guides to walk me through whatever I want to build. (This keeps me from forgetting how to code and also teaches me new things!)

It also has the nice side effect of creating a step-by-step process for the agents to follow. Next, I pointed Claude to the newly created game folder (where the guides are now too) and said “Implement Guide #1.”

Off it went, writing code, testing what it made, and making adjustments. It was really cool watching it run Unity and fixing things as it went.

the results

After about an hour, and a few pieces of input from me, this is what it made.

Not bad at all.

The next day, I thought I’d spend another hour on it and see where we could get. The more I played it, the more I wondered why I went with Bionic Commando? The character in my story has a jet pack, not a grappling hook! So I asked Claude to replace the grapple with a jetpack.

Then I:

  • imported one of my favorite asset packs, SurrounDead (a zombie game setting)
  • imported a handful of animations from Mixamo
  • told Claude to create a level and implement the assets.

This is where we landed after the second hour of development:

Pretty neat, right?

I gotta say, we’re going place with AI. I feel like Tony Stark working with Jarvis.

Tony Stark from Iron Man

My plan is to keep hitting this project for an hour a day until Claude finally starts to choke. What if that never happens? Well, I guess I’ll be shipping this game to Steam!

Stay tuned.