The development story of SheepKnight — a few weekends of work (but with a year-long break).
About a year ago, I saw a post like “Free Grok makes a game from a single prompt.” I wanted to try it (I mean, who wouldn't?). I decided I needed to practice with AI to overcome the existential dread of its development and, at the same time, accelerate that development so they could finally replace me and I could go work as a diving instructor (who wouldn't choose that?).
Nothing but Tetris came out of a single prompt, or even two. In the end, over a couple of weekends, I put together a browser-based Vampire Survivors clone. In another weekend, I generated sci-fi pixel art and music for it. You can still see the trailer
Mmm, DALL-E generated characters...
Then I wanted to polish the game and port it to mobile. But I ran into an issue: a browser game on Phaser.js didn't want to just "become" mobile, and using WebView resulted in low FPS, which is critical for a shooter. Building it properly in Unity or Cocos wasn't part of my plan, as I didn't want to spend a ton of time.
A year passed, AI improved, and some people were sent to work in factories. I decided to try again. Claude recommended Godot; I’d encountered it at work before, so it was a good excuse to get to know it. I gave Claude the original JS code and wrote a technical requirement (TR) for what I wanted to see in the end. And lo and behold, Claude produced a ready-to-use archive with basic scenes and scripts for Godot. It turns out Claude is very good at GDScript—this made things much easier, especially when providing clear specs (sometimes a couple of pages long). After a day of tweaking, I could build the first APKs. You can download it here: https://cosmopark.itch.io/cosmo-survivor
But I still didn't like the game and had no desire to go through the ordeal of app stores with it. Then I saw a magnificent asset pack on Itch by Pixel Frog:
How can you not fall in love with this asset pack?
And now the game is available on
