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Seven Tips for Making a Good Action Game with Claude Opus 5.5
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A Japanese developer blog shares seven tricks for using the AI model Claude Opus 5.5 to make fun, old-school style action games. The author shows how these tricks helped build several browser games.
What the article is about
The author says Opus 5.5 can handle many game-making jobs, such as coming up with ideas, designing, coding, making art, and writing music and sound effects. Simple instructions can already make a game. But a few small tricks can make the game feel much better. The author lists seven of them and shows games made this way, all playable in a web browser.
The games and key facts
- Six browser games are shown, including WRECKFALL, UNDERTOW, HEAD RUSH, ZIG SABER, OVERTURN, and PARALLAXIA.
- HEAD RUSH: players missed more than 20 times in 3 minutes, but the bot missed fewer times.
- PARALLAXIA: a bot with slower reactions missed 3 to 7 times more than people did.
- PARALLAXIA: after fixing a counting error, the share of small enemies that left without firing was 4% to 47%, depending on the flight pattern.
- OVERTURN: the same player reached the level of a one-step-higher bot on their third play.
The main ideas
The seven tricks include: give the AI random game ideas to spark creativity; compare about 10 ideas and cut weak ones; write down what makes the game fun before coding; build a small first version and let people play it early; make bots that play like real players to test difficulty; and give real playtest results back to the AI. Bots help check balance quickly, but real people are still needed to find problems that only show up when playing.
Why it matters
The article shows that AI can help make games quickly, but good results still depend on human testing. Bots can measure many things fast, yet they do not play exactly like people. Matching a bot to a real player's skill and habits can make games feel fair and fun without many rounds of human testing.
What to watch
- Whether the seven tricks work for other kinds of games, not only action games.
- How closely bots can copy real players' habits, such as slow reactions or predicting bullets before they appear.
- Which problems still need real people to find, even when bots are used.
Glossary
- Claude Opus 5.5
- An AI model from Anthropic that the author uses to help design, code, and test games.
- WRECKFALL
- A fixed-screen shooter game in the article where shot-down enemies fall as wreckage.
- UNDERTOW
- A side-scrolling submarine rescue game where the player picks up drowning people from the sea.
- PARALLAXIA
- A vertical bullet-hell shooter with three modes that change enemy bullet speed and scoring.