Khaberni - In a step that opens a wide debate about the future of the gaming industry, an independent developer named Grolav, known as "Crunch Fest," launched what he described as the first game in the world entirely designed using artificial intelligence and programming.
The game is called Codex Mortis, and it is inspired by the gameplay style of Vampire Survivors, where the programming codes, background music, and significant parts of the visual elements were generated based on artificial intelligence technologies, according to the "Interesting Engineering" site.
Codex Mortis falls into the survival game category, based in a grim world of black magic and intense combat, where players face successive waves of demonic enemies, collecting mysterious and ancient pages that enable them to progress through stages and unlock new powers and abilities. The game combines the fast pace of battles with an atmosphere of dark fantasy, along with an open development system that allows nearly unlimited building options.
The game is designed for both single-player and cooperative play modes, maintaining the known survival mechanics in "heavy shooting" games, but within an environment saturated with mystery and magic, giving the experience a different feel.
The developer explained that ChatGPT played a pivotal role in designing the graphics and building the characters, while the animations were created through custom visual effects developed using Claude Code, noting that the project took about 3 months to complete.
A 44-second promotional trailer for the game was published on the Crunch Fest channel on YouTube, showcasing the gameplay style and the dark world atmosphere in which the events take place, while the game is currently available on the Steam platform, without announcing an official release date so far.
The game's introductory advertisement on Steam describes the core of the experience, saying: "Death is your weapon.. Mix five types of black magic, unleash a synergy of devastating spells, and create armies of the undead in a thrilling and exhilarating game. Endless building options, single or cooperative play – harness the forbidden and dominate. The game was developed entirely using artificial intelligence."
Grolav revealed that the project began as an experiment to test the feasibility of building a complete game without traditional human intervention, noting that one of the biggest challenges was creating visually cohesive characters, which he credits the success to ChatGPT.
He said, "I used the regular GPT, not the image API interface. I also faced difficulty in traditionally animating the characters, so I resorted to a dithering style based on shading."
He added that Codex Mortis is his first experience in developing a game without using an external game engine like Unity or Unreal, indicating that integrating Steam with Electron was not smooth, while his attempts with Tauri failed due to incompatibility with the platform.
In a striking comment, the developer summarized his experience, saying: "The comparison with traditional application development shows that this approach is much less mentally exhausting.. It's like giving an exoskeleton to a builder."
