Side project
In my spare time I am making a game called VACU-1: The game that Sucks! You play a robot vacuum: you clean other people's flats, dodge cables and cats, and build a better machine in the workshop. I do not write the code, AI does. I do everything else.
The division of labour has held since day one. The agent writes all the code, the shaders, the scenes and the scripts that generate 3D models in Blender. I decide on the look, the colours and the atmosphere, I say what needs doing, and I judge whether the game is fun. The agent cannot draw and cannot tell what is ugly, but it can read screenshots. So I give it feedback on the visuals in pictures, not in words.
It is like a project with one developer who never sleeps. The original design was done in a few days: ten flats connected by a corridor, three kinds of dirt, a route planner, a workshop with swappable parts, cats and cables, and sound and music that are generated rather than recorded. Then came things no plan had foreseen: a warm flat and a cold robot, a workshop instead of a garage, and choosing parts the way tuning games do. Most of the time goes not into writing code but into deciding what is good and what goes.
It is the same work as on client projects, just without a team of people: set the brief, set the priorities, accept or send back. But there is one thing neither the agent nor any measuring script can judge: whether the game is fun. Only the person playing it can tell. The game is built in Godot 4 and played from a top-down view. You can find out more at vacu1.com.