Age of Anything

Devlog

Workers that swing their tools, walls and a new name

I only asked for one thing at first, after day two gave the game its look. Centaurs should kneel on their front legs when they gather. But I was sure there was more wrong with how units move, so I asked for a list of everything before anyone touched the code.

It was a long list. Every part of a unit is its own sprite, so it can only move the way the parts are joined, and they weren’t joined much. Working was a tiny lean and a tool turning in the hand. The horse half of a centaur did nothing at all, and attacks were a twitch.

Picking from options

Claude drew a few options for each problem using the game’s real art, and I picked. Workers now swap between three arm poses as they work, raising the tool, bringing it down and reaching for the ground. Centaurs fold their front legs and kneel to forage. Beetles and spiders don’t really have hands, so they dig in with their heads.

Humans and frogs at work: walking, foraging, chopping and building, in the game's own animation

The first centaur kneel swung the front legs right back under the belly and honestly looked like broken legs. Folding them short with a bit of knee reads much better.

Centaurs kneeling to forage, and beetles digging with their heads

Lots at once

I was playing and sending notes quicker than one session could get through them, so Claude split the work up between several agents, each on its own copy of the project, and merged them back in as they finished. That got us a tech tree page, walls with long gates, stances, a research queue, waypoints, a healer, 38 research icons, a bigger map and a dice button in the lobby for a random race, all in one day.

Wooden palisades and a stone wall with a gatehouse, round a frog town

I cut the fourth age and the Temple too, for now. Nothing gets thrown away though, they’re parked and can come back.

Some bugs from the day:

  • Watchtowers had been shooting the whole time, you just couldn’t see the arrows.
  • Bushes held 2,000 food each, so nobody ever needed a farm. Once we fixed that, the bot went the other way and built a farm for every worker it had.
  • Crossbows crept forward a step after every shot, because their orders kept sending them home, and home was past the enemy.

A new name

It was Age of Whatever until today. Age of Anything says it better.