Fable 5. Holy Moly · Create Games with AI

Fable 5. Holy Moly

I upgraded my Claude account to Max x 20 to take advantage of Fable being available under the subscription model until June 22nd before it’s removed to pay as you go (meaning I won’t be using it again until it comes back into subscription). It’s really absolutely fascinating to see it in action and it is already making me sad to lose it on the 22nd although they have said they will bring it back into subscription options as soon as they can. (I calculated I’ve spent well over $500 CAD on AI in the past month or so under the guise of experimentation but of course that isn’t sustainable, until it starts making me some money). I’ve only been doing fun / creative stuff so far..as Claude is already so good with documents so for run of the mill stuff I’m not sure you would be able to tell the difference.

But for my creative / gaming / fun let’s see what it can do brain it’s actually remarkable. As I have a ton of credits to get through (although at this pace I won’t make it through to next Thursday when it resets with any left) it’s allowed me to experiment in a major way. And the beauty of Claude code is if you have the availability of credits you can be coding as many apps as you want simultaneously. So I used the following prompt on 6 games that I’ve previously tried to clone as a starting point to then twist them into something different for my Anomaly Arcade project. In all previous cases the results were never very usable without a ton of tweaking / and normally they are so far off the mark it wouldn’t be worth it. When you would end up with something playable like with simple games like Galaga you would get a working shoot em up that might belong from that era but it certainly wouldn’t feel at all like the original in the slightest, sharing just a tiny piece of DNA.

So the prompt is at the bottom of this message. Very simple. And I used it in 6 games just changing the name of the game for each prompt. And I have run them in Opus 4.8 and also Fable 5 on High settings (which is the middle option). Opus would generally create something playable, you might recognize it as a distant cousin to what we were looking for, sometimes it would be playable but be nothing like the original in any way. But very hit or miss. If you got very lucky it may give you a starting point. More complex games like Outrun have no chance at all of getting anything playable on first go let alone similar to the original. Fable on the other hand scores 6 for 6. It obviously did its research very carefully in the case of outrun it found a repo where someone reverse engineered the code. However , as its guardrails won’t allow it to use that it just took all the key values if needed to recreate the overall feel and structure but every sound, graphic, level layout etc is original of its own creation inspired by the original. Or as it calls it “a tribute”. 😁

All 6 are like this. Instantly recognizable as the game they are cloning (down to it using the exact resolution of the original) but all its own work and graphics etc. so Galaxians looks like Galaxians but it’s not identical. Not a single error or bug in any of them. To be honest I only tried outrun to see how badly it would do but the entire core game is there. It’s a bit blocky, but it has all 15 stages, timings and feel completely locked in. Marble Madness has levels inspired from the original but the feel of the marble as it rolls down the course is PERFECT. Fairly simple games I’ve tried before that have never even got close have essentially given me as close as you could get without copyright infringement on first pass. With a few prompts on each of these you could get them to something reasonably polished I’m sure. Then just for fun last night on the first one that landed, a clone of Berzerk maze shooting game from 1979 I added the option for modern graphics that can be turned on on the fly (this my request to create these games from my prompt in a way that will allow me to add beautiful visual refinements afterwards). So with a single key press Berzerk instantly changes the presentation from something that looks like it belongs in 1979 to something with beautiful lighting and effects but without changing the gameplay at all, as the underlying gameplay engine remains the same. Mental. Here was my simple prompt.

Create an absolute perfect clone of classic arcade game xxx for me. Create it with cutting edge tools so that later we can add in amazing special effects. Do deep research into design and how it plays / works / scores / level design etc so you nail this as a perfect clone initially. Keep the graphics / vector art / sprites and overall aesthetic as close as possible to the original in the first instance

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