Marcin.Wojtala

Side project reveal 👑🐌 @royalslugs Since July I've been building Royal Slugs: a browser party game where you and a mate secretly plan your slugs' launches, lock in, then watch both plans collide at once. Phones become controllers with a QR code. Built end to end by directing AI agents, using the practices from my #Agentic #Playbook. So it's also my biggest experiment in how far that approach goes. It's in public alpha today. Expect wobbles, physics chaos and a lot of build-in-public posts from me. #indiedev #gamedev

Royal Slugs has been in public alpha for a week, and I've mostly watched my mates play it. Would be amazing to get some more feedback from other users, pushing the limits of my game physic engine. Jump in, play on the same screen or your phones as the controllers/ If you've got 15 minutes and a mate (or a second phone), come help me to test @royalslugs and tell me what felt wrong. I read every reply. royalslugs.com/?utm_source=x…

Don't forget, sometimes, the best agent session are the ones, when you decided NOT to build something. I co-authored a full server-side copy of the @royalslugs whole physics game as an ADR. The agent kept me convinced that this is the right direction. After a separate research agent session, I came up with a much simpler solution (inspired by multiplayer online games) Lesson: don't blindly follow your agent, if you are not sure about something, it oftens benefits to park the conversation, clear the context, and reset. Do your agents ever talk you out of things? #agentic #copilot #indiegame

My first phone controllers implementation in @royalslugs streamed the whole game to your phone 15fps, SYNCING but not really as excing as on the large TV or Monitor📱 I got an invulauble feedback from the mate: Then what is the point of showing it on the TV as well? Nobody looks up, they stay locked in on their phone during the action. You should keep the focus on the large screen, use the small one for actions. A true first-to-second screen handover. Thanks to that feedback, we changed it. Aim privately, one Lock in, EYES UP warning. Best thing you've ever deleted?

It's an alpha and it wobbles, but it's real and it's fun. Come and outsmart your friends: royalslugs.com/?utm_source=x… Reach out with the feedback please! The method behind it is in my Agentic Playbook.

5. Engineer the loop, not just the prompt. The agents run the browser tests the change affects, read the evidence, fix, rerun. I run them too on my machine. Then I review the code and push every commit myself. My job is designing that loop and catching it when it's confidently wrong.

4. Direction shift Not everything went according to the plan. I had to rewrite the Multiplayer engine to utilise web sockets; agents' recommendation (even in x high thinking mode) was not producing any tangible results. It's okay to go back to the research, you need to drive the decisions.

3. Small, reviewable steps. The desync: Soccer rules ran on the render loop, so each browser fitted a different number of physics steps per frame. The fix wasn't a rewrite. One rule: anything that affects the game runs on the fixed 120 Hz clock.

2. Hard calls become ADRs. Host vs server authority, fixed-step physics, how phones talk to the screen. The agent reads the relevant ADRs before touching code. It's my cure for comprehension debt: I can still explain every big decision in this codebase

1. GUARDRAILS: Agents don't get to call it done The repo has a delivery contract for every agent: finished means checked against the docs, rules under deterministic tests, the browser journey passing, and the docs describing what shipped It was mostly a note to myself, too.

Favourite bug so far: two slugs at full power flew straight through each other and out of the pitch 🐌 My fault. I'd set up @havok in variable-step mode, so one browser hiccup meant one giant step. Now: fixed 1/120 s steps, max 12 catch-up. Slugs collide properly. #gamedev

There should be an award or medal for sticking as close to the actual weekly usage limit for @bot. For anyone that has not tried it, yet, I strongly recommend!