No coding background: he shipped a Steam game in 9 months with Claude Code
Tommyruin · reddit · 2026-10-09
A solo dev with no CS training (a researcher by day) spent 4–8 hours a week directing AI coding agents since January and built a 1–4 player co-op roguelite, Aita: The Dark Domain, now with a free Steam demo.
By the numbers (from git)
- 1,198 commits across 169 days; 181k lines of game/server code plus 106k lines of tests (579 test files) — none typed by hand.
- 35 bosses, 115 Blessings, 65 achievements; 31 beta builds across web, Android and Steam.
- Only cost: a $100/month AI subscription he also uses for other work.
Workflow
- One rulebook: CLAUDE.md and AGENTS.md are the same file so Claude Code and Codex follow identical rules, including mandatory stops for releases, secrets, purchases and destructive actions.
- Tiered routing: Light = one agent; Medium = one agent plus a read-only explorer; Heavy = a main agent handing work packages to executor, tester and doc-writer agents, with testers sending bugs straight back to the executor and escalating only after two failed fixes.
- Living docs instead of memory: a source-of-truth map, an open-issues file, a changelog, and an end-of-session handoff written by an agent.
- TDD: rule changes need a failing test first, then parity tests ensuring the same situation resolves identically in solo, co-op and on the server; an automated check fails the build if game logic leaks into UI or network code, and GitHub runs everything on every push.
- Headless AI bots play batches of runs to report win rates and catch stuck states, tuned by a genetic algorithm.
Tools: Claude Code and Codex alternating, with Claude (Opus 5.5) doing most of the work for the last six weeks; ElevenLabs for audio.
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