Paul Sullivan

Since my last post last post I’ve been playtesting a lot and improving the gameplay, but have been a bit stuck on how to create good AI assets. I have the 5090 and a pile of local image models. My initial attempts at making a basic set of buildings were kinda lackluster. It worked, but the images were either too cartoony, or had too much added stuff, or just looked weird. I ended up biting the bullet and buying Meshy rather than continuing to tweak local models and eventually settled on a pipeline that works. Relying on Claude to generate image prompts worked surprisingly well, but I still need to do quite a bit of manual intervention to make the models work.

I’ve been itching to make something bigger than a one-off minigame after the EVE hacking prototype. This time the idea is a city builder game like Sim City, Cities Skylines, or Tropico but you’re building colonies on another planet. I’ve had this idea for years and even tinkered with some very basic logic in Unity once, but with the re-release of Fable 5 now seems like a great time to try it out.

I’ve been poking at Godot lately and decided to recreate one of my favorite little mechanics from EVE Online: the hacking minigame you get when cracking open data sites during exploration. Basically you explore around the grid looking for the System Core and once you encounter enemy nodes use a turn-based combat system to attack them. Simple concept, but tense when you’re sitting in hostile space with a hold full of loot. Thankfully, there’s a heavily documented wikicommunity wiki that explains it in detail. I used this to create a design document, and then let Grok Build loose on it.

I’m continuing to put my RTX 5090 through its paces. A few months ago I tried running Qwen3-Coder-30B on it and hooking it into VS Code and Copilot. This unfortunately produced limited results. The code it generated was alright, but it was very inconsistent with tool use even after some troubleshooting. It would just spit the code into the chat window rather than actually updating the files, and sometimes couldn’t even read files. Apparently the root cause of all this is that the Quen model was not configured to produce tool output in a way compatible with Copilot.

Recently xAI released Grok Build, their version of an AI coding agent like Claude Code. I’ve had a subscription to Grok for a while for chat so I decided to give it a try.