RUSuper’s week-five update on the fishing game he is building entirely with AI (Dredge meets Civilization) added little new content — most of the week went into fixing UI he calls “very basic and bad.” The real news is a redesigned fishing minigame with a clean risk/reward loop, and the most actionable advice the series has produced so far: build in-game editors instead of prompting the AI for pixel-perfect placement.

The fishing minigame, v2:

  • Keep the fish inside a target zone with WASD; rarity tiers run Common > Uncommon > Rare > Epic > Legendary
  • The longer the fish stays in the zone, the better the rarity — but the zone shrinks and the fish fights harder as rarity climbs
  • A Strain bar fills while the fish is outside the zone; max Strain snaps the line and the fish escapes
  • Press Space to “bank” the fish at its current rarity — but only while it is inside the zone

Why it works, and the rest of the week:

  • The bank button is the design — one commenter calls it “Dredge-meets-blackjack”: push for Legendary and risk the whole catch, or cash out early
  • Hex turn-based was tried and scrapped — the game started as a Civilization-inspired hex-grid design; dropped because “there were no real benefits of turn based fishing game over real time one”
  • The in-game editor lesson — Claude “will fail million time over simple things like position of the text or position of some models,” so the fix is asking it to build an editor that lets him drag, adjust, and save positions; he now has one for every HUD element and every model
  • The demo says it all — he moves the lighthouse in-game and saves the new location, instead of endlessly asking the AI for the perfect position
  • Editor-first workflow resonated — “The in-game editor tip is honestly the most useful thing I’ve read in this sub all month,” after a commenter lost an evening moving a UI panel 12 pixels with Claude
  • Also this week — heavy manual UI tuning, and an in-game map attempt that “is not going too well”

The week’s implicit thesis: with generative coding, stop prompting for precision — build the tool that lets you compose AI output yourself. Five weeks in, this series keeps converging on the same shape: AI generates, the human builds the editor and does the final placement. That is the part of AI gamedev that never gets automated.