Question about the development of the game for Zirtola

On youtube it says in your about you section that you used AI because you didnt know how to make a game...

Would you mind expanding on how AI was used specifically to make the game? was it used for coding... or assets... or did you ask it questions to learn how to code?

I am a software developer myself with 30 years of experience, and I am also developing my own pet project with Claude Code.

I see these questions come up often nowadays, and while that is understandable, it is also somewhat disturbing.

First, the shocking news: we developers generally develop with AI, everywhere, except maybe in nuclear reactors, aviation, military software, and healthcare (hopefully!).

Yes, AI has fully taken over the typing of code, but we had code completion for a long time before public AI appeared, and yes, there is no way back.

Unreal Engine 6 will slowly replace Blueprints with Verse, a code language, and Epic says AI tools like Claude will play a central role in building content. One of the most successful games, Manor Lords, did not use AI, but it was allegedly built 95% with Blueprints, where you place boxes and connect them with arrows.

The question is not whether developers use AI, because they do. The question is how they use it, and you won’t know that unless they write down their full process.

A serious question to you: with more than 30 years of coding experience and team leadership behind me, do you think I perform worse when leading an AI team than when I write the code by hand, or when I let my developers write it without seeing all of it?

It is true that too much AI slop is released, but the problem is not the AI, it is the slop. Releasing slop is cheaper now, but there is non-slop AI work too. All the software you use today has code written by AI, whether it is your bank, your insurance company, the government, social media, or anything else.

I cannot tell Zirtola's method is good or not, the code might be full nightmare for human reading :-). I also code things in language that I never used with Claude Code, yet I am still able to check the code as a lead senior developer, I can ensure you about that. If he ever coded, that is the same with him.

To me, as a lead dev, responsible for other devs work, working with AI is not so different on that part is the code good or not.

But if you try the app that is downloadable now, does it really count?

In my honest opinion, the only risk for all AI devs is that 1. we forget to code 2. AI becomes unavailable.

I think this is a risk for all the general developer world.

I personally dont care about AI being used as long as the end result is acceptable. Slop is slop regardless of AI or not (we used to call those shovelware way before AI, like multiple decades before that even). From what i can see from the devlogs, this game is in a early playable state which is normal, but it has features that no other game in the genre has, so it seems to be going the right track.