Show HN: Shards of Stone – A Warcraft 2-inspired RTS that runs in the browser (opens in new tab)

(shardsofstone.com)

2 pointsAJSturrock1mo ago2 comments

A browser-based RTS inspired by Warcraft 2, Age of Empires & Starcraft. 9 factions, 200+ units, fog of war, tech trees, naval combat, multiplayer, and AI opponents. Runs on desktop and mobile with no install.

You can play it here: https://www.shardsofstone.com

I built this over ~10 hours of spare time using Claude as my primary development tool. I'm not a game dev - I described what I wanted in big brain dumps and iterated across multiple threads. Each thread made heavy use of plan mode and specifically asking for sub agent teams to build systems in parallel. I only hit the Claude max plan limits twice.

The whole engine is HTML5 Canvas + Next.js with an ECS architecture. Running on Vercel and using Cloudflare R2 for assets. Using Suno for music, Elevenlabs for dialog and Gemini 2.5 Flash Preview Image (Nano Banana) for image generation. Claude handled everything else. Also looking at Tauri to build desktop apps for Mac, Windows & Linux.

Some things I think are interesting:

1. LLM-powered AI commander that reads live game state and makes strategic decisions (bring your own API key, or play against the built-in scripted AI) - is pretty cheap to battle against Gemini Flash models / token efficient.

2. AI vs AI spectator mode - pit different LLM providers against each other - a new form of LLM arena? The game system interprets the LLM commands so may be somewhat limited and is a balance for the LLM to be able to take actions strategically without getting too granular.

3. Voice control - hold V and speak commands (requires API key added in settings).

4. Crash reports log to a database that Claude can read, debug and patch automatically (27 crashes patched out today after posting on Reddit).

Still WIP: campaign mode, unit animations, terrain art (currently borrowing WC2-style tilesets until I can find or create a solution to generate consistent high quality WANG tilesets), and balance/unique playstyles across all 9 factions.

Best way to try it: play a skirmish against the AI on a forest map with no water. The AI's naval game can get a little confused.

2 comments

vunderba1mo ago

Nice job. FYI there have been a couple of attempts at an RTS LLM Arena with varying degrees of success.

Show HN: A real-time strategy game that AI agents can play

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47149586

Show HN: RTS for Agents

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=46649853

And of course there's a ton of research into more traditional forms of AI playing RTS games such as Alphastar.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AlphaStar_(software)

Feedback:

That percussive sound that starts the song at the beginning of Play is SUPER jarringly loud. I'd trim it out of the track entirely.

I know you've mentioned tileset improvements but just to put it out there you've generated isometric buildings, but the tile set you're using appears to be square based. This creates a very incongruous style where the buildings don't feel like they're actually attached to the ground.

Finally, about the pixel art you’re using: you’re asking Nano Banana to generate it, but there are a couple of issues with prompting pixel art from GenAI models. The most obvious one is that the pixels aren’t aligned to a traditional grid which leads to really noticeable fringing. This is especially obvious when I use the scroll wheel to zoom in on some of the art assets.

I’d highly recommend using something like Unfake [1] to clean this up, aligning pixels and reducing the palette to something more consistent. It’s a bit more manual work, but it will make your assets look dramatically better.

https://github.com/jenissimo/unfake.js

Here's an example of where I demonstrate generating better sprite sheets with NB:

https://mordenstar.com/other/nb-sprites

AJSturrockOP1mo ago

Thanks for all of this, really appreciate the detailed feedback and the links, will check those out.

Apologies about the drum hit at the start! Appreciate that is probably way too loud, especially on headphones. Cutting the first second out now and also adding a fade in for music track on the menu music to ease you in!

The tileset/isometric mismatch and the pixel grid fringing are both great calls. I am by no means an artist so this is a big help! I hadn't come across Unfake before, that looks super useful to clean up the existing assets and any new ones I generate.

I came across https://www.pixellab.ai/ today when I was researching unit sprite animation & tileset generation and think I may have to redo a lot of the graphics entirely, seems to be the most expensive part outside of the Claude Max plan..

Running through your suggestions with Claude now to get them implemented. Cheers!

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