I've continued working on my game project, Vestiges, which is a 2D narrative strategy rogue-like in Godot. In brief: I once had a career in game development, in

I've continued working on my game project, Vestiges, which is a 2D narrative strategy rogue-like in Godot. In brief: I once had a career in game development, in game design or project direction roles. Life circumstances derailed my career some years ago, but earlier this year a colleague encouraged me to experiment with genAI. I began Vestiges to see if I could create something again, to enjoy the creative process. It progressed well enough that I'm planning to complete and release it. For various reasons unrelated to the project, progress since last month has been slow (and I expect the next month will be as well). Most of the work I've done has been for peripheral features, not anything on the critical path. After my brother bounced off of the narrative elements (not unexpected :) ), I added an "aliterate" lens that distills the game into its strategy gameplay, burying the narrative content for those who aren't interested in it. In preparation for releasing a demo version, I added opt-in collection of a session's gameplay data, which I intend to analyze to find ways to improve the UI, UX, gameplay, balance. By default, no identifying information whatsoever is collected. A separate opt-in adds minimal technical information (things like OS, CPU, GPU, display settings). I added global text size option as an accessibility feature and used an MCP server to have Claude do the initial layout testing. This was an interesting experiment, but requires enough tokens that it's not very practical as a frequent part of development. These features went hand-in-hand -- via the MCP server, Claude takes a screenshot every five seconds to decide what to hover over or click on next. These screenshots consume tokens rapidly, so they are reduced in size. With a larger font size, the screenshots can be reduced further with the text remaining legible to Claude. Other housekeeping: numerous iterative improvements to my general development process and use of Claude. I wrote my first simple skill: used in conjunction with the brainstorming skill from the superpowers plugin, Claude creates an "origin" document that preserves my initial prompt and some aspects of the brainstorming discussion. I expect to launch a demo version once my current life situation settles a bit. I'm still not in any particular hurry, but it would be good to start getting player feedback. Also, to the whatever extent I do want Vestiges to have any commercial success, the largest obstacle I'll face is discoverability and marketing. A meta-comment: When I first mentioned this project, in the July "What are you working on?" (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48886151), I explained some back story of this project. It got a fair amount of attention, rising to the top of the post and encouraging some discussion. Last month (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234405 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49234405), I didn't repeat my story and received no upvotes or comments. This presents me with a quandary because it feels uncomfortable/self-indulgent to repeat my story each time, yet without that context, my project isn't particularly notable or interesting. (Or maybe luck/timing was a factor?)