A few days have passed, and my experience as an indie developer has grown a bit. During this short time, I’ve realized that mastering Unity, Spine 2D, and Photoshop with Stable Diffusion all on my own is going to be a bit challenging. I can delegate some tasks like marketing and SFX to my friend, but I’m running into issues with the rest.

Unity is manageable—Claude, though slow, does most of the core work with my guidance. I’m starting to get the hang of Stable Diffusion as well; I’ve created rough PNG images of my first character, which I’ll attach here, along with the first AI-generated art for the gallery. But Spine 2D is resisting me; maybe it just seems overly complex and tedious, but I really want to add animated sprites to give the characters a bit of “soul.” I also understand that creating VFX might be best done myself, but I haven’t reached the content-creation stage yet. For now, “VFX” still feels like a big, intimidating abbreviation to me.

Yes, I could find all of this in free assets, but my brief searches made it clear that this won’t be easy. I want everything to look good—not perfect, but good enough that I’ll be happy with it. And SFX is something I really want to get right (yes, to me, SFX includes minimal UI animations too). Development continues, but I’m worried that Claude is starting to slow down at an exponential rate. Meanwhile, I’m hitting content creation issues, and both the bugs and content I want to add for variety are gradually piling up. The game’s core is nearly complete, but I think a lot of solo developers underestimate the workload at first. I feel like I’m doing the opposite—worrying about each step as time passes, and I still have so much left to do. It’s turning into a survival race, and it’s not exactly fun. But challenges lead to creative solutions. Peace out, I’m off to curse at Claude again (yes, it curses back at me, it’s mutual).