Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5

I built this with Fable over a couple of days, on the side. It's a vanilla-WoW-flavoured micro-MMO in the browser: nine classic classes, three zones, a 5-player instanced dungeon, parties/duels/trades, and persistent characters. Free to play: https://worldofclaudecraft.com — and fully open source (MIT):

https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft

Honestly the most mind-blowing part for me was how much it shipped that I never asked for. The level of polish and completeness coming out of the model genuinely surprised me — quest logs, threat metrics in the combat log, eating/drinking, spirit release on death.

We already have some contributors on GitHub!

noworriesnate• 1 month ago

This is cool! I assume a lot of this was Fable orchestrating sub-agents with cheaper models, right? Something I noticed with Fable is that if it spun off three sub-agents in the cloud version of claude code, and then hit the 5-hour usage limit, all the work of those sub-agents would be lost (!). Did you run into the same thing?

One time though, I hit the limit when not running a sub-agent, and the agent resumed after the limit expired. Weird.

ls-sadboy5• 1 month ago

No this was all running on Fable. Used like 93% of my Max plan over the course of 2 days to get the initial version running

oeidjwkdjwkfj6• 1 month ago

You did a great job writing a prompt. Congratulations.

dools2• 1 month ago

I’m on a phone so I can’t see what this does, but it reminded me of this great presentation of a game style agent manager AgentCraft: putting the orc in orchestration https://youtu.be/kR64LOqBBCU?si=d3IS7SVy2lv0hM_A

fragmede• 1 month ago

fwiw, it loads on my (i)phone

Caracas288• 1 month ago

It loads but you can’t interact

dools2• 1 month ago

I was able to put in a username and password, choose a character and "enter the realm" but then within a second of the game graphics loading it crashes so I can't actually see what the game is about. Since it's called "World of Claudecraft" I thought it might be similar in concept to the AgentCraft video I posted. I still don't know if that's true.

ergonaught2• 1 month ago

I guess we'll just call anything MMO now.

ls-sadboy5• 1 month ago

What would you call it? A small multiplayer online?

catapart2• 1 month ago

"Multiplayer" or "Online Multiplayer". Pretty common in the days before WoW. They didn't invent "MMO" (was that Ultima?), but people called those a lot of different things, like "MUD" or "MUCK", because the niches played differently. MMO became a catch all around the time of WoW, though. Made for a clear, simple distinction between internet scale player count games and countable concurrent player games.

Edit: didn't realize you were the author, asking a practical question about how to describe your project. Sorry about that. For that, I personally think you're fine. You're trying to tell people what it is, not be super technically accurate.

henryfjordan• 1 month ago

The term MMO is about the game/server architecture more than the size of the game. MMOs are online games with a single (or sharded) persistent gamestate. That's it.

Most shooters have rounds that restart, breaking the persistence quality of the game. Other games like Minecraft emphasize individual / private servers and break the "single gamestate" proposition. The "Massively" word refers to that single gamestate that many users can interact with, not how many do actually play.

To me, The "play offline" option is more against the MMO definition than the actual number of players.

ergonaught2• 1 month ago

I'm sure that's a fine take if you decide that "Massively Multiplayer" doesn't mean "Massively Multiplayer".

LearnYouALisp• 1 month ago

The rotation makes me motion-sick

kxrm• 1 month ago

Claude, add support for Firefox and Mobile views!

xpct• 1 month ago

This was made in 2 days and 91% of the Max 20x plan, as the author stated on the Reddit thread, so roughly ~$200. Supposedly, existing free assets were used and weren't generated.

I'd say demos like these stand to profit the most from LLMs, if the goal is to make as much as possible in a few days: a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices, and some skills for the initial 9 classes to pick from. A human would generally spend a lot of time here, thinking about whether the class/skill choices fit their world, what type of progression is fun and isn't. It's also where player testing would be important for a game to set good pacing and balance the difficulty.

Of course, the game itself is barely playable, it randomly stutters when I walk too far away from camp, the character controls are unintuitive, etc. A lot of this stuff could be chipped away by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself, getting a feel for what you want the game to be. That by itself should require a game to take more than a few days, if we expect others to play it and enjoy it. Something simple like movement controls could take many game iterations to iron out, and those aren't hard technical tasks.

Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

avaer• 1 month ago

a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans

"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here. As you (and the original author) mentioned, almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries. Almost everything is a copy-paste. The Fable part is linking and debugging until it doesn't crash.

The main value proposition of LLMs is to wash the credit away from the giants and take it for yourself.

I wish we would give credit to Kenney [1] for making sick asset packs, mrdoob for making THREE.js [2], etc. than Fable for running curl/wget...

[1] https://kenney.nl/assets [2] https://threejs.org/

mikgp• 1 month ago

This demo actually kinda blows my mind and makes me want to purse a game idea I had that wanted this exact aesthetic and capability

It gets said ad nauseam but a lot of software development is remixing. Think about how much gaming innovation happened in the Warcraft and StarCraft map editors. The Birth of tower defense, moba, and probably many more.

ianbutler4• 1 month ago

So basically what a normal person is going to do initially?

echelon2• 1 month ago

"Create" is doing a lot of lifting here.

No, it's not.

And assets will be generated soon, too.

Stop downplaying how absolutely fucking magical this is.

We are at an inflection point in civilization.

This is the most amazing time in all of human history.

daishi55• 1 month ago

almost everything was assembled from downloaded free assets and libraries.

As opposed to when humans get into game dev and roll everything themselves from scratch?

manquer• 1 month ago

by spending more time on the project and testing it yourself
a human would generally spend a lot of time here,

This was always the hard part - game engines, asset libraries and all other services / SDKs were always making code-generation cheaper every generation.

Releasing a bug-free, thoughtfully built product requires a lot of attention and product skill.

jenniferhooley• 1 month ago

Yeah, I feel like nobody realizes you can put together premade/open source game base + assets in a weekend. And before LLMs there were guys who specialized in this and got really popular on social media for "making a game in a weekend".

Always interesting reading threads about topics you know deeply and everyone else has no familiarity or understanding about what they are seeing. Stark reminder of how easy it is to be impressed when you don't understand a topic.

rottencupcakes• 1 month ago

The plans have weekly limits, but are charged monthly. So this is actually only about ~$45.

vb-8448• 1 month ago

91% of weekly limit of 20x plan is about 1500 bucks in API equivalent.

graypegg3• 1 month ago

a barrage of quests are easy to generate, so are gear choices

Yeah that sounds like WoW retail heh.

Kill 200 boars.

Kill 300 boars.

Kill 250 boars and use this sword.

Kill 251 boars and use this special sword.

I heard about a better sword over there. You have to get past the 200 boars.

Wow, thank you for saving me from the boars. Please take this Boar Bane sword. You should try it out on 200 boars.

buredoranna• 1 month ago

Or, as a variation on the theme...

kill 200 brown boars.

kill 300 black boars.

jeremyjh• 1 month ago

Don’t forget, “Kill the guy and get the thing, then take that to this other guy.”

Reason0772• 1 month ago

Killing thousands of boars for fun/XP? This is basically ecocide. Shame on WoW for promoting such behaviour.

Jare2• 1 month ago

For every ten kill X quests you get a Mankirk's Wife quest or a Hogger and it all works out great. 80% of almost everything is filler, like our bodies are 70% just water, but it's the taste that matters.

jplusequalt3• 1 month ago

Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

Does this excite you?

Yokohiii2• 1 month ago

Still, I can't entirely wrap my head around the fact that I live in a world where a machine can create this with minimal intervention by humans, and do a somewhat OK job at it, to the point where I'm willing to spend 10 minutes playing it.

I don't know what that means. I can post something random on social media and there is a chance some person will spend 10 minutes on it. I don't need an LLM nor any money for that effect.

jdpigeon2• 1 month ago

You'd be a fool to spend more than 30 seconds on it if you'd played an actual MMO anytime in the last five years. It's immediately apparent how poor quality AI-generated games like this are.

ricardobeat• 1 month ago

Aaand it’s down.

cmpxchg8b• 1 month ago

hugged to death

graypegg3• 1 month ago

Just a hotpatch maintenance window to release The Token Burning Crusade expansion. At this rate we're looking for a true WoC Classic release for the real fans in like a couple weeks.

cm2012• 1 month ago

Well, this is outrageously impressive

ls-sadboy5• 1 month ago

Thank you!

balefulboy• 1 month ago

i got a 502

swyx• 1 month ago

502 Bad Gateway nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)

hugged to death?

ls-sadboy5• 1 month ago

Yeah RIP. Had a few performance issues which we're finding and fixing as we go

bel8• 1 month ago

502 Bad Gateway
nginx/1.24.0 (Ubuntu)

commenting so I remember to check again later when it's back.

coreyoconnor3• 1 month ago

Everytime i read one of these vibe coded projects i wonder: Is AI capable of building well structured programs? Designs with strong separation of concerns. Clean code. Short, well defined functions.

This is not how I'd design much of this. Does that matter? AI and whatever training data used seems to differ.

colechristensen• 1 month ago

I've built very large structured programs with claude. Talking about the structure is indeed an important part of the exercise. It's also an important factor in success. Context is limited and separation of concerns is an essential part in the LLM being able to do it at all. The chunk of "what needs to be done" needs to be small enough for it to be able to recall and reason about. Bad architecture will result in spinning your wheels constantly changing spaghetti soup that never meets spec.

Building a CAD kernel one of the essential pieces in getting from vaguely working to closing an extremely large number of gaps was some rather strict separation of concerns – without it we were just stuck on perpetual rearchitecting switching from methodology to methodology opening new gaps with each attempt to close others.

password4321• 1 month ago

I thought one of the tenets of vibe coding was letting go of code quality, perhaps even to the point of not looking at the code?

adam_arthur• 1 month ago

The lower the code quality and less coherent the design, the poorer the agent will perform over time as the project grows.

Pure vibe coding pretty much limits the max scope of your project to the capability of the agent, and if you're trying to make something real and maintainable, you'll always end up with something worse than the person who guides it at a lower level.

That being said, there are certainly going to be systemic/built in ways to have coding agents generate coherent architectures. Just it isn't really baked in right now.

Probably an ideal model with current tech is the main coding agent thread that implements things, and a secondary thread that constantly compacts/prunes and cleans up according to specific style rules.

Problem with doing both in same context via AGENTS.md is the LLM often won't adhere to all rules if it's overloaded with many competing instructions. But you can scope the code styling agent prompt tightly and get much higher focus and adherence.

esikich2• 1 month ago

Yes, you just need to tell it to do that. Before I start I go back and forth talking about the architecture and making design docs. If you start with good bones, things go much better than stepping through adding things and ideas ad hoc.

oeidjwkdjwkfj6• 1 month ago

Yes, you just need to tell it to do that.

Indeed. All you have to do is say “and make it good”, and it will make it good.

twostorytower• 1 month ago

This is so cool. Where did the free assets / character models come from?

mike1o1• 1 month ago

You can see the CREDITS.md which has links to the models: https://github.com/levy-street/world-of-claudecraft/blob/mai...

Yokohiii2• 1 month ago

Not surprised that it is impossible to play.

mycocola• 1 month ago

It's impressive that Fable 5 was able to resynthesise something like this from its training data, but I am really not looking forward to more of this. What's the point?

jordemort• 1 month ago

What is the point of all these projects like this, except to say that you did something? (that you didn't actually do but half-assed a minimally plausible version of, so hey)

It's tale as old as time at this point: the LLM produced something sort of shaped like some other software, and did it in an impressively short amount of time, but it's basically impossible to bring a codebase made in this way up to production standards, or to maintain it in any reasonable way. Nobody's gonna pay money for this, or want to play it instead of Warcraft. Why should anybody care?

moomoo11• 1 month ago

it reminds me of no code builders when that was all the rage in like 2018 or so

nobody made anything interesting. all the arr sham was from people trying it out for a month and then realizing it sucks.

coding agents are only really useful in the hands of competent engineers.

there will be these type of projects by tourists that 99% of people will find useless and become throwaway wasteful projects.

hoping to FF to 2029 or whatever to see what’s next.

inigyou3• 1 month ago

No-code builders have been through so many cycles... COBOL was one of the first. There's no code involved because it's just English, see!

phendrenad2• 1 month ago

Impressive. Don't listen to anyone who says otherwise, I don't see them running a fun little browser MMO.

Some people will see this and think "wow, in 5 more years I'll actually be able to make World of Warcraft". Some will see this and think "Wow, I can make World of Warcraft now with 1/100th the cost and engineers". Neither of these thoughts are right, though. The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".

[1] - roughly $63 million, 5 years, 60 engineers

weird-eye-issue• 1 month ago

The reality is more like "Wow, someone can make a game 10 times as good as World of Warcraft for the same[1] cost and number of engineers".

What? Writing code is not the bottleneck for how good a game is

Also your figure about there being 60 engineers on the team that launched WoW is completely incorrect. That was the total size of the team near the end and only about five of those were actual developers. Most of those were artists and other designers. I suggest you read the world of Warcraft development diary book it's actually very good. A lot of the development time went into writing tools to support the artists and designers. The actual amount of time that went into coding the game itself was a very small percentage of the overall time spent on the game

It's all about how a game actually feels which comes down to art, balance, progression, music, gameplay, lore, and so much else where you need people with obsessive levels of detail to perfect. I'm not saying LLMs can't help but it's ridiculous to make claims like this

Folcon• 1 month ago

Ok, this is impressive in terms of gluing things together

Yea it's buggy and janky in places, but equally it's coherent from a 3d perspective and 2d UI one

I don't know how many people have been trying to get claude to vibe code games, but it's really not good at it, I've been fiddling about and trying to make it work for a few months now

Yes, you can make flappy bird or snake level stuff, but anything much bigger honestly just falls over after a while

And that's after lots of prompting and feedback

Now what I'm really interested in here is how much of this was "strongly steered" vs oh that's cool, let's do that, ie trying to "sculpt" and fit an artistic vision of some kind that the driver is envisioning vs liking what it outputs and just asking for more of the same

The distinction between using it as a tool vs just being excited to take whatever it gives you

The other thing I'm wondering is how much of this is strongly indicative of claude's capability with typescript, I personally don't use it, so that might be hampering me more than I realised

This may be an unpopular thing to point out, but to those that are saying it's blindly copying code, I'm pretty sure most of the Wow code on the internet wasn't written in typescript, so there's some transformation going on there, how meaningful it is I'm less that certain about

I'm beginning to feel like I just wasn't ambitious enough[0], I was thinking of this as a good opportunity to see if Fable was capable enough to teach an abstract skill like game design

Though I am happy that the code it's generated so far is actually quite tractable, ie it's been working hard to keep itself maintainable, which honestly is new from my perspective, not sure what other people's experiences have been, but I tend to find that agent's in general are just a bit too willing to increase LOC without enough in the way of features to justify that line count in my mind, it makes the juice just not worth the squeeze in my mind

-[0]: Here's what 45% gets you on a 5x plan (https://github.com/Folcon/inkstain-engine)

saghm2• 1 month ago

Yea it's buggy and janky in places

Anyone who thinks that this makes it a bad WoW clone has probably not played very much WoW. There have always been lots of weird bugs, and recent expansions have only gotten worse.

oeidjwkdjwkfj6• 1 month ago

Please, let’s not get cute. This isn’t the same thing and you damn well know it.

accrual• 1 month ago

I haven't played the newer expansions, but the classic client (v1.12.1 in my case) from ~2006 is a nice piece of software. I've run it on old Pentium 3 clients and modern hardware under Win 11 and Wine and it just works everywhere I fire it up. It handles scaling well (I can play it 4K OLED or 1024x768 CRT), it behaves during alt-tab, and every button/tab/shortcut feels thought out.

byzantinegene• 1 month ago

the language the original wow code is written it doesn't matter because translating programming languages is trivial for a llm.

jdpigeon2• 1 month ago

Hey. This is a total nightmare in my opinion. The dark mirror of something that I know and love and represents one of the highlights of human digital authorship.

If you'd like to play the actual game with other SWEs I'd invite you to help me start a guild for SWEs: https://unplanned-downtime.com/

arminiusreturns• 1 month ago

This is super cool!

I am using some llm work to help me bring my mmo project (2013-present) to prod, but my project is much more about pushing the edge of the mmo technology space, and my strategy has as one of its pillars the importance of owning the IP, which means adhering to the current laws in my production pipeline, so I only use unix/linux philosophy and have the llm do small tiny things in skeleton mode so I can rewrite them enough to claim they are actually mine, which they are. Even though I intend to open source the client fully, and the assets, I have to have the copyright so I can assign it to those licenses.

Technically, according to current SCOTUS rulings and precedent set so far (hopefully better things and changes to come, but here we are), this can not be copyrighted by the person who paid for the compute to make it.

When money starts hitting these kinds of projects, the legal wolves will be soon at the door, and it's going to get messy I think. So I still support open source gaming projects, but pure agentic or vibed games are probably going to face tons of challenges in the not too distant future based on my analysis.

leyra2• 1 month ago

thats sick.

leyra2• 1 month ago

sick.

Jotalea• 1 month ago

it took me 5 minutes with the cheapest Claude Code plan to make a userscript with cheats for this game.

Mmorpg World of ClaudeCraft, vibe coded with Fable 5

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