epaga

Coincidentally, my high-school aged son is actually hosting a LAN party at our house today, they're going to be playing Counterstrike and Minecraft. LAN parties are very much not dead if we decide they shouldn't be.

I've gone through multiple phases.

Phase 1 (mid 2025): Have AI write the simple stuff if you want, but hand-write the important core stuff.

Phase 2 (late 2025): OK, let AI write the important core stuff, too, but review every line of code.

Phase 3 (early 2026): Wow, AI is making virtually no mistakes, so only review the important core stuff that it writes.

Now (since mid 2026): If using newer models like Opus 5.5 or Astra, no need to review its code as long as the behavior is as expected. I'm no longer a software developer or coder, I'm a software creator.

I'm a bit confused, isn't "Wispr" a trademarked term? Why would you pick a name that could easily be shut down?

You may be underestimating how unpopular AI is among the younger generation.

It may change in the months to come, but it’s astonishing to me how negative the outlook of Gen Z is on AI.

Your comment released me from the frustratingly puzzled feeling I had at what they were aiming at with "noul"... that totally makes sense.

As far as I understand, the best any AI was able to get to until now was being able to produce blue science which is like level 2 or 3 of a science tree like 10 levels deep.

To me who has maybe put 20-30 hours into Factorio, this is even more impressive stuff than some of the Blender videos I've seen... just mind-boggling.

Thanks! I've been into submarine sims since I was a kid and my dad showed me Silent Service 2. Later I got into Silent Hunter 4 and I started thinking that it would be fun one day to distill the core tactical stuff to just a simple map (so that you could practice the geometry stuff of approaching ships with uncertain data).

That idea bounced around in my head for ages until I decided back in February to give it a shot and make a prototype. It turned out that the prototype was a lot of fun so I kept going :)

While we have you here - I've seen this discussion multiple times - does @dang "do" anything to get your attention, or did you just happen to see it because you were scanning the comments manually, and therefore email is better for letting you know something?

Think not but “Normal Shark” just didn’t have the same ring to it

Two weeks ago, I released the tactical map-based WW2 submarine sim Silent Shark (which I got feedback on from HN for beta test a few months ago https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48180924 ) and it's gone extremely well for a side project - I've had over 100 Steam reviews, 99% of them are positive, and I have sold a few thousand copies so far.

I began working on this game just 6 months ago and have only worked on it in my spare time in evenings and on weekends, instead of playing computer games. I made the early decision to use Codex for 100% of the coding, that has been a phenomenal experience.

The only Image Gen AI I've used has been to clean up 2 old and weathered historical maps I found, to make them readable.

Still have over 25,000 Steam wishlists and growing. I'm super thankful and having a blast.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/

They very wisely removed the code part and specify you only need to disclose GenAI stuff.

That looks really cool, hadn't heard about that.

But I did grow up with Silent Service II. And it turns out, the subsim niche is bigger than I had thought. Very fun!

Wow, hadn't heard of Sunless Sea till now, what I'm seeing of it looks gorgeous, thanks.

For Silent Shark, the map being kind of the "protagonist" if you will and then having the trays of buttons or instruments on the side was also kind of the idea in my head from the beginning.

Till now at least from sub sim fans I've heard nearly only praise for the design. But to be fair, most of the more famous submarine sims aren't necessarily known for beautiful clean UI anyways, so it's not like there are high expectations I suppose. :)

Thanks! The "pre-pilot training" this is pretty much what the Basic Tutorial is all about, have you tried it?

Thanks so much! A few of those are on my (very long) list already. It's been so great getting so much positive feedback and ideas coming in.

Thanks for trying it out and for the feedback! I used to have the red arrows be pulsating and got feedback that it felt "too much" and kind of out of place in the game... probably need to find a middle ground.

I'd also like to hear what AI smells you are picking up in the game.

The only AI graphics in the game (as described on Steam) are literally just clean-up jobs of existing historical maps. That is it.

This is very much a hand crafted game. The design is my own - what I heavily used AI for was the coding side of things as well as for creating my own tools for myself to design things like ships, instrument dials, shipping lanes, etc.

Nearing the release of my first game ever - Silent Shark, a tactical, map-based WW2 submarine sim releasing this Wednesday on PC, Mac, and Linux! I'm at about 17,000 wishlists on Steam and I'm having such a blast. Very impressed with Steam so far.

I designed Silent Shark to be the sweet spot of minimalism meeting realism of dials and procedures (like a simulated Torpedo Data Computer) that scratches my simmer geek itch without being impossible to write the game myself.

https://store.steampowered.com/app/4705650/Silent_Shark/

Browser demo: https://silentshark.app/alpha

Such a beautiful tribute. You get such a sense of his urgency at really wanting as many as possible to understand how precious and wonderful this woman was to him.

Thanks so much! It's been an absolute blast to create and tweak.

Continue work on my map-based WW2 Pacific submarine sim Silent Shark https://silentshark.app - I just added lifeguarding missions and am going to do my first ever "developer broadcast" on Steam tonight for the Steam Next Fest and hoping I don't screw things up...

I've been pleasantly surprised at the community beginning to get excited about the game.

If you look at the trajectory of your stance, do you think you might reach "Uh-oh this is doing just as good a job as I can do in a much shorter time?" within the next year? I feel like that's what happened to pure coding for me, something I never ever thought would be possible.

The unreliability is something that seems like it might be a temporary early stage.

Yes indeed - ARCore on Android, ARKit on iPhone - AR optimizations are crazy good.

Hey! Thanks for recommending this!! That’s my app. :) pushing the tracking work off to the phone is helpful for freeing up resources on the computer.

My teenage son has held multiple LAN parties this past year at our house. They are far from dead, just maybe not quite as widespread as they used to be when I was his age.

If you join our Discord and ping me there, I can add you to TestFlight for beta testing the App Store version!

Thanks so much for the kind words!

> How long did it take you?

It's taken about 3 months of my spare time (some evenings and a few weekend afternoons) so far.

> Is any of it vibe-coded?

I actually started the project back in February as an experiment to train myself in prompting and to see how far I could get using Codex and letting it do literally all the coding for me. It turned out, I could go all the way. I have not touched a single line of code myself (I have only tweaked some CSS from time to time). This project has led me to realizing my 20+ years of professional experience in coding are clearly worth far less than they were just a couple years ago...

> As you already stated, the browser version is a Vite/TypeScript app, but what programming language is the actual game in?

The actual game is written in TypeScript. For the Windows/Mac/Linux/Steam Deck/iOS/iPadOS/Android builds I'm using Electron to package it (which has surprised me for how well it's working even though I always kind of hated Electron...)

Found the setting and fixed that.

Optimized to webp. Thanks again!

Whoops thank you! Will optimize soon.