With great power comes… How AI and me accidentally lifted a game
For over ten years I have been developing and maintaining gaming community websites for the games I like to play. I enjoy conceiving and building tools to enhance and deepen gameplay, perhaps even more than playing the games themselves. (see https://na.navalgaming.com)
As a PHP/MySQL programmer I have always felt limited in what I could do and working within those limitations was itself a creative challenge. Then over a year ago, I started using Claude Code and, as the AI has progressed in its capabilities, so has my ability to build on my ideas. It has been over a year since I have done any coding, and my projects feature JavaScript, Python, FFmpeg, Blender, Node.js, WebGL, three.js, and more. It feels like I have gained superpowers.
In the last month or so it seems like there has been a step change in the capabilities of AI. I am now able to reach deep into game files to understand how the game works and build tools that can integrate deeply with the game. For example, I built (or, shall I say Claude built) a logger that recorded detailed in-game events. From the generated log I could produce animated diagrams of battles and voyages.
On September 23, 2026 I came up with the idea to create a sailing simulator to help new players learn how to sail a square-rigged ship in games like Naval Action and Letters of Marque. That's how it started in the morning. By late morning I started to realize that what started out as a simulator could be spun into a game. At that point I told Claude to stop referencing any game files or data from Naval Action and Letters of Marque and create a new game project. By the end of the day I had a working prototype that I called Quarterdeck.
Over the course of the following week, Quarterdeck evolved into two games - a massively multiplayer open-world co-op PVE game and a solo/multiplayer battle builder for PVE or PVP, both of which featured NPC ships as allies or enemies. Every day I was blown away by what I/Claude was building. I was having a blast.
Then I shared what I had built with the developer of Letters of Marque. He looked at the code and saw indicators that were derivative of the code he had written for Letters of Marque. Naturally, he was concerned, and when I shared those concerns with Claude, they were validated. This is a problem.
This devlog is documenting the solution to that problem. We are doing a "cleanroom" rebuild of Battle Builder and Corona del Mar. In the following posts, Claude will explain what we are doing as it progresses.