Making Games in Go: 3 Months Without LLMs vs. 3 Days with LLMs
17 days ago
- #Game Development
- #LLMs
- #Go Programming
- The author, a software engineer with 15 years of experience, built and published a card game called Truco in Go without using LLMs, which took 3 months.
- Challenges included learning React for the UI, transpiling the server to WASM using TinyGo, and hosting on GitHub Pages.
- A year later, the author built another game, Escoba, in just 3 days using LLMs (Claude), which refactored the backend code almost perfectly.
- The frontend for Escoba was more challenging due to React skills and debugging in JavaScript.
- The author provides a step-by-step guide for building a game with this stack, including backend and frontend tasks.
- Backend involves initializing a GameState struct, implementing CalculatePossibleActions, and RunAction to mutate the GameState.
- Frontend tasks include rendering the GameState, letting players pick actions, and triggering bot actions.
- The author explains how to transpile the backend to WASM using TinyGo and handle interop between backend and frontend.
- Troubleshooting tips are provided, such as serving files over HTTP locally.
- The author concludes by sharing their enjoyment of making the games and hopes others find the guide useful.