Totally get where you are coming from, but there is no way I could have coded anywhere near as fast without AI. The game has no 'engine', it is built from the ground up. While there are a few 'god classes', and a little spaghetti, it's overall pretty decent. I can run many agents in parallel without merge conflicts due to the fact it's well separated and modular. It's closer to a game engine for Survivor Roguelikes than a game itself. The bottleneck was actually balance, sound, music, art etc.
The article goes into more details, but you will find that AI can easily handle it if you use the techniques I discussed :) Let me know if you got questions about that further, I will continue to do more coverage into it over time, as there are plenty of techniques that help out (many in the article, some not :D).
But still expect to put in plenty of work, it's not some 1 shot machine...although maybe Ralph Loops will change it soon...which I have experimented with!
Totally get where you are coming from, but there is no way I could have coded anywhere near as fast without AI. The game has no 'engine', it is built from the ground up. While there are a few 'god classes', and a little spaghetti, it's overall pretty decent. I can run many agents in parallel without merge conflicts due to the fact it's well separated and modular. It's closer to a game engine for Survivor Roguelikes than a game itself. The bottleneck was actually balance, sound, music, art etc.
The article goes into more details, but you will find that AI can easily handle it if you use the techniques I discussed :) Let me know if you got questions about that further, I will continue to do more coverage into it over time, as there are plenty of techniques that help out (many in the article, some not :D).
But still expect to put in plenty of work, it's not some 1 shot machine...although maybe Ralph Loops will change it soon...which I have experimented with!