I've been trying to make one game for twenty years. Not "a game": this game, a horizontal shoot-'em-up with R-Type's dread. Every few years I'd start again with a new engine and a new notebook, and it always ended the same way: a folder of half-finished levels and a day job on Monday.
The vision was never the problem. I could see every mission, and I could hear it. I've been writing music "for games" for two decades, as REKLAW, for a game that didn't exist. What killed every attempt was having one pair of hands. A shmup needs code, art direction, effects, UI, balance, story and sound, and by the time I'd taught myself one of them I'd lost momentum on the rest.
This year I built it with an AI pair programmer. I'm saying that first because I know how a lot of people feel about AI, and I'm not hiding it. I used Claude with Godot. It wrote code and some of the art. I directed it, and the design, the story and the music are mine. Phase Break exists because of that partnership.
Phase Break
Phase Break is a 2.5D arcade shooter: six missions, three bosses, a story told over the radio, and global leaderboards. No ads, no accounts, no tracking. It's free in the itch.io Halloween Sale this week.
- Play it: https://pedrohead.itch.io/phase-break
- The soundtrack, pay what you want: https://pedrohead.itch.io/phase-break-soundtrack
- The album the music comes from, The Buzz: https://soundcloud.com/peterwalker78/sets/the-buzz
Then I didn't stop
Finishing something for the first time in twenty years changes what you think you're able to do. So I kept building, the same way, and the next things all turned out to share one idea: software that's on your side instead of farming your attention.
- Slipstream is a keyboard-first desktop for Linux, with its own Wayland compositor built on Smithay. It holds your notifications until you pause typing, lets windows you put away pour down the edge of the screen as streams of light, and measures nothing about you. It installs beside the desktop you already have, and it's at 1.0 release candidate.
- Glimmerwood is a quiet browser. A small wisp brightens when you read, learn or make something, and grows sleepy in an endless feed.
- Westering is for the end of the day: a few quiet minutes under tonight's real sky, and then it suggests you go and look at the real stars, or go to bed.
All three are free and open source: https://peterwalker78.github.io/human-again/
None of these would exist without AI, and none of them put AI in front of you. That's the balance I've come to believe in: let the machine help the person make the thing, and don't make the thing about the machine.
If any of it speaks to you, I'd love to hear what you think, here or in Slipstream's discussions: https://github.com/peterwalker78/slipstream-desktop/discussions. I'm a solo developer and you'd be early.
This post was drafted with Claude's help, from my own notes and launch copy.
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