17-year coder built an RPG in 5 months without writing a single line himself

Campaign Forge is a tactical RPG built in the Godot engine, where an AI co-author writes a chapter-by-chapter campaign story tailored to the party the player creates. The developer has 17 years of programming experience, but for this project left every code change to Claude (moving through Opus 4.6 up to 4.8, plus Fable when available). Instead, the developer's job became everything other than writing code: leading the design, reviewing every output, playtesting extensively, and writing very precise bug reports.

Two rules made this work. First, whenever the developer wanted to change code directly, they instead explained their reasoning to Claude and asked whether it was correct or whether a better approach existed, then discussed and decided together rather than editing the code by hand. Second, Claude wrote all project documentation at every step, and this documentation doubled as Claude's own long-term memory of the project.

Not everything worked: at one point NPC dialogue was templated to save tokens on small local models, but this flattened every character into the same voice, so the change was reverted.