Over the past year I have been rebuilding a game I used to be a heavy part of, on both the coding and infrastructure side. It is a text-based RPG, and it has been my main side project. Honestly, without Generative AI, my coding skillset would have made this near impossible to pull off.
Allow me to preface this now and say that I am not a UX Designer. I'm an Infrastructure and Backend Engineer. I just look for functional and working, not necessarily the prettiest.
That said, there has been a huge amount of learning along the way, and a fair few caveats and guardrails you need to put in place. Here is what I would tell anyone starting something similar.
Our new landing page with guest access.
Use CLAUDE.md and a memory file. Claude re-reads CLAUDE.md from disk after a compaction, so anything written there survives while loose conversation context gets summarised away. I keep a MEMORY.md imported into CLAUDE.md for recurring learnings, and Claude Code's built-in auto memory (browsable with /memory) now handles a lot of this for you. Lean on all of it for recurring context. It costs tokens, but it saves you a lot of pain later.
Set up strict Git workflows and rules. Make sure branch protection is in place, and wherever you can, ensure your working AI cannot merge from dev to prod. That one boundary has saved me more than once.
Build security into the pipeline. Run regular scanning as part of your CI, and lock your packages so non-critical updates sit for around 14 days before you pull them in. That cooldown helps you dodge supply chain attacks, which are getting more frequent.
Pen test your own environment before anyone else does. I ran a proper pass over my dev box, with the AI acting as a co-pilot alongside the usual tooling. It is easy to let an AI ship features fast and forget that the same speed applies to the holes you leave open. Treat the security review as a feature, not an afterthought.
Get your statistics gathering in early. Build instrumentation into the game from the start rather than bolting it on later. Knowing what players actually do, where they drop off, and which systems get touched is the difference between guessing and deciding. The AI is happy to scaffold the logging and the reporting for you, but you have to know what questions you want answered first.
Put real humans in front of it. No amount of AI assistance replaces a handful of actual people playing the thing and telling you what feels off. They will find the unclear wording, the dead ends, and the balance problems you stopped being able to see weeks ago. Get a small group testing early, take their feedback seriously, and feed the patterns back into your own decisions rather than straight into the AI.
The in-game character overview page, available to guests before they sign up.
Have the AI write reusable scripts, not one-off runs. If you find yourself asking the AI to perform the same kind of task repeatedly, get it to write a script you can run yourself instead. Re-running functions through the AI burns context every single time, where a saved script costs you nothing on the second use and beyond. Build your own little toolbox as you go.
Manage your context deliberately. On long-running conversations, run /compact regularly to keep things tight. Before you move on, document any new learnings into MEMORY.md or CLAUDE.md so they survive, then run /clear once a task is finished to reset context back to baseline. Treating context as a resource you actively manage, rather than something that just fills up, makes a real difference over a long session.
None of this replaces knowing what you are building. The AI made a project at this scale possible for me, but every guardrail above exists because I stayed in the driver's seat rather than handing over the wheel. A little over a week on from release we have around 100 new players, the numbers are still climbing, and the community keeps surfacing features and bugs faster than I could alone.
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If you want to see what came out the other side, you can join the game at https://dragonswords2.com.