Getting Back into Game dev

Learning game engine fundamentals, collision detection, drawing my own pixel art, physics, sound effects, tile maps and world building - games are pretty damn complicated. The burnout was real, I didn't have the energy to keep it up as a hobby.

Back then, every aspect of game development was a grind. Want a walking animation? Open up your sprite editor, draw it frame by frame, tweak it pixel by pixel, realize it looks terrible, start Over. 

Want collision detection? Spend days reading tutorials, watching youtube guides, 

implementing it wrong three times, then finally getting something that mostly works.

These days I don't need to spend countless hours grinding tutorials, reviewing and tweaking every line of code. Instead I can focus on what actually matters - the ideas and design - while AI handles the heavy lifting on the code end.

My latest project is https://codemarchant.com/meme-fighters — a 2D fighting game where internet legends like Doge, Pepe, Nyan Cat, GigaChad and Grumpy Cat battle it out. Its got combo systems, special moves, multiple stages, soundtracks and AI opponents. 

I built the whole thing using https://claude.ai/claude-code through my tool

https://apps.odoo.com/apps/modules/19.0/odoo_remote_mcp within odoo. Yes, you read that right I built a fighting game through an ERP system designed for business web apps. (I really need to start using proper game engines like godot or unity for this)

For the character sprites and animations, I used https://www.pixellab.ai/mcp to generate 2D sprite sheets. The technology is genuinely impressive - being able to describe a character and get back usable sprite animations is something that would've blown my mind 12 years ago.

That said, it wasn't all smooth sailing. The generation queues were slow, especially for animations which have limited capacity. I found the AI needed to constantly requeue jobs that timed out or got stuck. And uploading the generated assets? The binary MCP upload was painfully slow, couldn't get them neatly from a URL endpoint, so i ended up uploading a lot of the sprites manually to save time.

But the end results speak for themselves. The sprite animations look good (albeit a little bit scuffed), and what would have taken me weeks of pixel art work was done in a fraction of the time.

It's early days for this kind of tooling and I'm excited to see where it goes.

The barrier to entry for game development has dropped massively. I'm not saying AI replaces the craft - you still need to understand game design, you still need to know what feels right, and you still need to make a lot of creative decisions that AI cant make for you. 

But the grunt work? The boilerplate? The hours spent on things that aren't the core creative vision? That's where AI shines.

Meme Fighters - free to play in your browser.

Check out more games in the game vault: https://codemarchant.com/game-vault.