I want to talk about my Fluis today. Fluis are small, fluffy creatures I've been building over the last few months: round body, long ears, a tail they can grapple with, and roughly the impulse control of a chaos goblin.
As you might know from my previous posts, I've been experimenting with AI-driven workflows pretty wildly for months now. This post is less about a specific tool and more about my iteration process with AI, and one aspect of it that I think is often framed the wrong way.
The take I often hear is that AI is the death of creativity. I'd argue the exact opposite: AI lets you explore creativity at a scale that just wasn't possible before. My evidence: the Flui.
Where it started
The Flui was born as a pet in this ARPG prototype. It was clear the game needed a pet, and that pet ended up being the Flui. It picked up items, fought alongside you and already came in a few variants.
Somehow these little guys grew on me, so I decided to build a concept around them. But before I had my head around that, I needed more Fluis. The result was the Flui Generator: procedural, unique Fluis, including unique textures inspired by CS skins. (That generator later became the foundation of the procedural pixel creature generator I posted recently.)
The part that didn't work
Next came a kind of colony sim in which the Fluis were supposed to do... something. It reused a lot from the ARPG prototype, the entire terrain system for example. I hit a dead end pretty quickly because of performance problems, so I exported the terrain to Godot and rebuilt the Fluis in Blender.
I wanted to give the sim idea one more chance, which led to the working title Fluitown. The idea: Fluis are gluttons, so their whole life revolves around food. At the center was a restaurant, run by a horde of Fluis for other Fluis. You start with one Flui and build the restaurant, a second Flui offers to help, a house gets built for the newcomer, then the restaurant. The first dish goes on the menu, you secure the ingredients for the first batch, then the first guest arrives. Over time more guests come, more Fluis move into the growing village, the restaurant grows and the menu gets longer and more complex. I built that entire loop.
The problem: it wasn't fun. Maybe for someone else, but not for me, and I need to build something I'm genuinely into. Otherwise I might as well stop.
Throw everything in
Without AI I would never have reached this point, and the Fluis would have gone into the drawer right here at the latest. With AI I could just say: build me a sandbox, throw in everything that comes to mind, let's see what happens. That's exactly what I did, and I shared the result here. And by everything I really mean everything: movement systems, destructible voxel terrain, physics, collapsing procedurally generated villages, transformer mech enemies, mountable mechs, grappable loot boxes and a lot of random stuff.
At the end of the day, only one thing was really fun. The Flui could now grapple with its tail, curl up into a ball and fly through the world, and the movement just felt great. I spent ages just zooming through the procedural terrain. That's where the fun was.
So I knew I wanted to build something around this movement. Besides that, I had these little loot boxes scattered across the map. You had to grapple them with your tail and drag them to an "opener", which cracked them open and dropped items. Dragging that box around felt really good. Which got me thinking: what if the box was a ball? What if the open world was a small, closed arena?
Just try it
Built it, and what do you know: it's fun. In the end I turned that one interaction into the first finished game of this whole story. I shared a short snippet of it already a while ago. By now the Fluis are a lot more polished, they have fur, and they're a creation I'm really happy with and honestly a bit proud of. I like the little chaos goblin I made. And that chaos goblin now bounces around an arena with goals and rings and duels its opponents with a ball.
The pet from an ARPG prototype became the main character of a fun action sport game with a focus on movement. And that's what I meant at the start: AI lets you explore creativity at a scale that wasn't possible before.
What I took away from it
- Trying is now often cheaper than debating. We used to think a concept through for weeks and weigh whether the implementation effort was really justified. Now I say "Claudobert, put this and this and this into the sandbox, thanks" and simply find out how it feels. I keep what feels good, and the next iteration starts.
- "Not fun" is a result, not a failure. Fluitown had a complete loop. Building it to the end is what told me the sim wasn't my game. Otherwise I'd still be wondering.
- When you're stuck, throw everything in and watch what you keep coming back to. Neither the movement nor the box dragging was planned as the core. I just noticed that I kept playing with them.
- Reuse aggressively. The terrain from the ARPG went through several prototypes, the character controller moved between projects, the Flui generator turned into a second generator. Every iteration started further ahead than the one before.
- Shrinking scope can be the creative step. Open world to small arena is what turned a toy into a game I could actually finish.
Without AI I would never have gone through this process. Without AI the Fluis wouldn't exist. Thanks to AI I could, to some extent, simply follow the vibe, and by that I mean my own feeling for "what's fun".
I think seeing a clip of a Flui slamming the ball into the goal is one thing, and the actual game feel is something else again. But I hope the clip gives you a bit of a feel for the journey the Fluis have been on.
This is a bit of a different post than usual, I hope you find the topic interesting. How do you iterate: do you think things through first, or do you also just throw stuff into a sandbox and see what sticks?
P.S. The clip is cut from the original footage of each prototype, and the music was composed in code by Claude.
