🐷 Come piggies, I got slop!

[Usnul]

I’ve been working on a totally original IP for the past few days called “Old Circle”, not to be confused with lesser-known FromSoftware’s 2022 hit “Elden Ring”

Repo under open source: GitHub - Usnul/old-circle: The Old Circle · GitHub

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First, the why out of the way. I’ve been upgrading meep to version 3 over the past month or so, integrating shade as the main renderer. And I needed some test projects to test-drive the upgrade. Quake 3: Arena port was one such project. This is another.

Another bit is the fact that OpenAI’s GPT 6 Astra was released, and it’s supposed to be good at 3d modelling and spatial reasoning.

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The goals:

• large open world
• persistent networked world (MMO-style)

This is scoped specifically to exercise scalability of the new renderer, give the physics engine a workout and exercise the networking package in meep.

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I approached this as a fairly traditional game dev project. Specifying design, driving concept art and developing tooling. Except, you know, I asked AI to do most of that work.

I intentionally didn’t criticize or ask the AI to redo anything at his point.

We got a concept art shot from the start

After 2 hours and 17 minutes GPT-6 Astra (Max Effort) came back.

Old Circle - devlog 1

It wasn’t pretty. Very janky, the art doesn’t match up, particle effects messed up, geometry misaligned, animations missing or broken.

But! it works, you can run around and fight things, there is a camera, there’s terrain etc.The gameplay rides on a cleanly separated Worker thread, in prepartion for networked play.

+ 20 minutes (AI time)

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Asset placement issues are partially solved, animations partially fixed. Asset matching is much better.

+ 3 hours (AI time)

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Old Circle - devlog 2

A lot of jank has gone away, there are animations, there are proper ragdolls, but AAA game this is not

+7 hours (AI time)

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Old Circle - devlog 3