Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5
70 points
2 hours ago
| 23 comments
| worldofclaudecraft.com
| HN
xpct
1 hour ago
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This was made in 2 days and 91% of the Max 20x plan, as the author stated on the Reddit thread, so roughly ~$200. Supposedly, existing free assets were used and weren't generated.

I'd say demos like these stand to profit the most from LLMs, if the goal is to make as much as possible in a few days: a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices, and some skills for the initial 9 classes to pick from. A human would generally spend a lot of time here, thinking about whether the class/skill choices fit their world, what type of progression is fun and isn't. It's also where player testing would be important for a game to set good pacing and balance the difficulty.

Of course, the game itself is barely playable, it randomly stutters when I walk too far away from camp, the character controls are unintuitive, etc. A lot of this stuff could be chipped away by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself, getting a feel for what you want the game to be. That by itself should require a game to take more than a few days, if we expect others to play it and enjoy it. Something simple like movement controls could take many game iterations to iron out, and those aren't hard technical tasks.

Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

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avaer
59 minutes ago
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> a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans

"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here. As you (and the original author) mentioned, almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries. Almost everything is a copy-paste. The Fable part is linking and debugging until it doesn't crash.

The main value proposition of LLMs is to wash the credit away from the giants and take it for yourself.

I wish we would give credit to Kenney [1] for making sick asset packs, mrdoob for making THREE.js [2], etc. than Fable for running curl/wget...

[1] https://kenney.nl/assets [2] https://threejs.org/

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mikgp
47 minutes ago
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This demo actually kinda blows my mind and makes me want to purse a game idea I had that wanted this exact aesthetic and capability

It gets said ad nauseam but a lot of software development is remixing. Think about how much gaming innovation happened in the Warcraft and StarCraft map editors. The Birth of tower defense, moba, and probably many more.

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jplusequalt
29 minutes ago
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I've said this before, but LLMs are the next evolution of content consumption.

You no longer need another human to consume content, you just prompt your AI for the dopamine you want in that moment instead!

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ianbutler
36 minutes ago
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So basically what a normal person is going to do initially?
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cyanydeez
32 minutes ago
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the difference people typically credit where things come from and not 'look at what the llm did' See how that works?
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ianbutler
16 minutes ago
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> See how that works?

Don't get cute.

Now to answer substantially, no frankly unless I'm legally required to I don't credit things. I usually specifically go for licenses that let me do whatever I want. I don't think I've ever credited a library I didn't have to I just use them and make things with them. That's the point of them and no one would raise your point in a pre LLM world imo.

Edit: Like as the point of absurdity no one is thanking the creators of postgres for every project that happens to use postgres. You still made a thing even if you didn't write your database from scratch.

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dugidugout
7 minutes ago
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Were you not "[being] cute" yourself? I don't like it, but they did have to goad you into giving some substance.
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Yokohiii
21 minutes ago
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> Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

I don't know what that means. I can post something random on social media and there is a chance some person will spend 10 minutes on it. I don't need an LLM nor any money for that effect.

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graypegg
55 minutes ago
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> a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices

Yeah that sounds like WoW retail heh.

Kill 200 boars.

Kill 300 boars.

Kill 250 boars and use this sword.

Kill 251 boars and use this special sword.

I heard about a better sword over there. You have to get past the 200 boars.

Wow, thank you for saving me from the boars. Please take this Boar Bane sword. You should try it out on 200 boars.

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Reason077
10 minutes ago
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Killing thousands of boars for fun/XP? This is basically ecocide. Shame on WoW for promoting such behaviour.
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buredoranna
46 minutes ago
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Or, as a variation on the theme...

kill 200 brown boars.

kill 300 black boars.

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montagg
39 minutes ago
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“Boars are attacking the town! Kill 200 to thin the herd.”

“We tried everything to cure the boars, but we couldn’t. If they go any farther, they’ll infect everything. Kill 200 to stop them from infecting the forest.”

“You are inside your own mind. Your fears surround you. Fear of the boar. Free yourself. Kill 200 dream boars.”

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Lwerewolf
34 minutes ago
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Kill 3 boars, 3 spiders, 3 wolves. Forgot to tell you they share spawns so if you don't find any of X, kill Y & Z until X spawns.

:upsidedownface:

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jeremyjh
33 minutes ago
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Don’t forget, “Kill the guy and get the thing, then take that to this other guy.”
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rottencupcakes
57 minutes ago
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The plans have weekly limits, but are charged monthly. So this is actually only about ~$45.
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vb-8448
36 minutes ago
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91% of weekly limit of 20x plan is about 1500 bucks in API equivalent.
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manquer
57 minutes ago
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> by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself

> a human would generally spend a lot of time here,

This was always the hard part - game engines, asset libraries and all other services / SDKs were always making code-generation cheaper every generation.

Releasing a bug-free, thoughtfully built product requires a lot of attention and product skill.

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jplusequalt
51 minutes ago
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>Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

Does this excite you?

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Folcon
11 minutes ago
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Ok, this is impressive in terms of gluing things together

Yea it's buggy and janky in places, but equally it's coherent from a 3d perspective and 2d UI one

I don't know how many people have been trying to get claude to vibe code games, but it's really not good at it, I've been fiddling about and trying to make it work for a few months now

Yes, you can make flappy bird or snake level stuff, but anything much bigger honestly just falls over after a while

And that's after lots of prompting and feedback

Now what I'm really interested in here is how much of this was "strongly steered" vs oh that's cool, let's do that, ie trying to "sculpt" and fit an artistic vision of some kind that the driver is envisioning vs liking what it outputs and just asking for more of the same

The distinction between using it as a tool vs just being excited to take whatever it gives you

The other thing I'm wondering is how much of this is strongly indicative of claude's capability with typescript, I personally don't use it, so that might be hampering me more than I realised

This may be an unpopular thing to point out, but to those that are saying it's blindly copying code, I'm pretty sure most of the Wow code on the internet wasn't written in typescript, so there's some transformation going on there, how meaningful it is I'm less that certain about

I'm beginning to feel like I just wasn't ambitious enough[0], I was thinking of this as a good opportunity to see if Fable was capable enough to teach an abstract skill like game design

Though I am happy that the code it's generated so far is actually quite tractable, ie it's been working hard to keep itself maintainable, which honestly is new from my perspective, not sure what other people's experiences have been, but I tend to find that agent's in general are just a bit too willing to increase LOC without enough in the way of features to justify that line count in my mind, it makes the juice just not worth the squeeze in my mind

-[0]: Here's what 45% gets you on a 5x plan (https://github.com/Folcon/inkstain-engine)

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saghm
10 minutes ago
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> Yea it's buggy and janky in places

Anyone who thinks that this makes it a bad WoW clone has probably not played very much WoW. There have always been lots of weird bugs, and recent expansions have only gotten worse.

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ergonaught
1 hour ago
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I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.
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ls-sadboy
32 minutes ago
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What would you call it? A small multiplayer online?
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catapart
10 minutes ago
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"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.

Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.

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jordemort
26 minutes ago
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What is the point of all these projects like this, except to say that you did something? (that you didn't actually do but half-assed a minimally plausible version of, so hey)

It's tale as old as time at this point: the LLM produced something sort of shaped like some other software, and did it in an impressively short amount of time, but it's basically impossible to bring a codebase made in this way up to production standards, or to maintain it in any reasonable way. Nobody's gonna pay money for this, or want to play it instead of Warcraft. Why should anybody care?

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moomoo11
13 minutes ago
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it reminds me of no code builders when that was all the rage in like 2018 or so

nobody made anything interesting. all the arr sham was from people trying it out for a month and then realizing it sucks.

coding agents are only really useful in the hands of competent engineers.

there will be these type of projects by tourists that 99% of people will find useless and become throwaway wasteful projects.

hoping to FF to 2029 or whatever to see what’s next.

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Aurornis
1 hour ago
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Impressive for a few days of Fable time.

And here I am watching my 5-hour window disappear over a couple simple tasks in a CRUD app.

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allthetime
1 hour ago
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You can generate simple CRUD apps with free plans / old models.
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beatthatflight
2 hours ago
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magicalist
1 hour ago
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Ha, why is the creator's account banned?
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kay_o
37 minutes ago
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Its reddit side ban not subreddit side so likely spamming en bulk triggered.
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coreyoconnor
50 minutes ago
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Everytime i read one of these vibe coded projects i wonder: Is AI capable of building well structured programs? Designs with strong separation of concerns. Clean code. Short, well defined functions.

This is not how I'd design much of this. Does that matter? AI and whatever training data used seems to differ.

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esikich
33 minutes ago
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Yes, you just need to tell it to do that. Before I start I go back and forth talking about the architecture and making design docs. If you start with good bones, things go much better than stepping through adding things and ideas ad hoc.
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password4321
36 minutes ago
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I thought one of the tenets of vibe coding was letting go of code quality, perhaps even to the point of not looking at the code?
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colechristensen
41 minutes ago
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I've built very large structured programs with claude. Talking about the structure is indeed an important part of the exercise. It's also an important factor in success. Context is limited and separation of concerns is an essential part in the LLM being able to do it at all. The chunk of "what needs to be done" needs to be small enough for it to be able to recall and reason about. Bad architecture will result in spinning your wheels constantly changing spaghetti soup that never meets spec.

Building a CAD kernel one of the essential pieces in getting from vaguely working to closing an extremely large number of gaps was some rather strict separation of concerns – without it we were just stuck on perpetual rearchitecting switching from methodology to methodology opening new gaps with each attempt to close others.

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swyx
56 minutes ago
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> 502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)

hugged to death?

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ls-sadboy
32 minutes ago
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Yeah RIP. Had a few performance issues which we're finding and fixing as we go
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Yokohiii
32 minutes ago
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Not surprised that it is impossible to play.
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bel8
55 minutes ago
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> 502 Bad Gateway

> nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)

commenting so I remember to check again later when it's back.

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twostorytower
41 minutes ago
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This is so cool. Where did the free assets / character models come from?
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mycocola
29 minutes ago
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It's impressive that Fable 5 was able to resynthesise something like this from its training data, but I am really not looking forward to more of this. What's the point?
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ls-sadboy
1 hour ago
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Creator here — fun to see this show up!

I built this with Fable over a couple of days, on the side. It's a vanilla-WoW-flavoured micro-MMO in the browser: nine classic classes, three zones, a 5-player instanced dungeon, parties/duels/trades, and persistent characters. Free to play: https://worldofclaudecraft.com — and fully open source (MIT):

https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft

Honestly the most mind-blowing part for me was how much it shipped that I never asked for. The level of polish and completeness coming out of the model genuinely surprised me — quest logs, threat metrics in the combat log, eating/drinking, spirit release on death.

We already have some contributors on GitHub!

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noworriesnate
44 minutes ago
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This is cool! I assume a lot of this was Fable orchestrating sub-agents with cheaper models, right? Something I noticed with Fable is that if it spun off three sub-agents in the cloud version of claude code, and then hit the 5-hour usage limit, all the work of those sub-agents would be lost (!). Did you run into the same thing?

One time though, I hit the limit when not running a sub-agent, and the agent resumed after the limit expired. Weird.

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ls-sadboy
30 minutes ago
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No this was all running on Fable. Used like 93% of my Max plan over the course of 2 days to get the initial version running
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torgoguys
17 minutes ago
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Care to share prompts so we can see how involved you were vs how habds off you were able to be?
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dools
1 hour ago
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I’m on a phone so I can’t see what this does, but it reminded me of this great presentation of a game style agent manager AgentCraft: putting the orc in orchestration https://youtu.be/kR64LOqBBCU?si=d3IS7SVy2lv0hM_A
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fragmede
1 hour ago
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fwiw, it loads on my (i)phone
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dools
48 minutes ago
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I was able to put in a username and password, choose a character and "enter the realm" but then within a second of the game graphics loading it crashes so I can't actually see what the game is about. Since it's called "World of Claudecraft" I thought it might be similar in concept to the AgentCraft video I posted. I still don't know if that's true.
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Cassell
57 minutes ago
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It loads but you can’t interact
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phendrenad2
19 minutes ago
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Impressive. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise, I don't see them running a fun little browser MMO.

Some people will see this and think "wow, in 5 more years I'll actually be able to make World of Warcraft". Some will see this and think "Wow, I can make World of Warcraft now with 1/100th the cost and engineers". Neither of these thoughts are right, though. The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".

[1] - roughly $63 million, 5 years, 60 engineers

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kxrm
1 hour ago
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Claude, add support for Firefox and Mobile views!
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cm2012
59 minutes ago
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Well, this is outrageously impressive
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ls-sadboy
31 minutes ago
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Thank you!
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cmpxchg8b
1 hour ago
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hugged to death
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graypegg
58 minutes ago
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Just a hotpatch maintenance window to release The Token Burning Crusade expansion. At this rate we're looking for a true WoC Classic release for the real fans in like a couple weeks.
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LearnYouALisp
1 hour ago
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The rotation makes me motion-sick
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joemazerino
1 hour ago
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Doesn't seem to work on mobile?
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balefulboy
56 minutes ago
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i got a 502
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ricardobeat
1 hour ago
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Aaand it’s down.
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LoganDark
1 hour ago
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The right-click to attack isn't really friendly to clickpad configurations (like Apple laptops). Still impressive!
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