Thanks for this thoughtful write up of your process. I’m increasingly thinking about what context the model has and keeping it as focused as possible - both to reduce token usage, and to ensure it doesn’t have any cruft in it that potentially causes the model to go down an un-useful path. The prompts for this read like what I imagine a conversation with a junior developer would be when handing off a task.

In practice, this is usually clearing the context after quite small changes and the prompting for the next one with just what I think it is going to need. I guess this is ‘context engineering’ although that sounds like too fancy a term for it.

Probably not what you are looking for, but I think a great place to start is Pico-8, there is an education version, but it only costs $15 to start making games in Lua with the real version on your machine. Although it’s very limited (think like Game Boy color games) you will learn a lot of the basics, there’s 1000’s of games you can look at the code of, and a good community and learning resources.

It’s a quick easy way to get started in game creation, and if you’re new to programming it will be a while before you run out of challenges.

Like a number of commenters have said, it depends on what type of games you want to make - Pico-8 is limited, deliberately.

Proxmox on the metal, then every service as a docker container inside an LXC or VM. Proxmox does nice snapshots (to my NAS) making it a breeze to move them from machine to machine or blow away the Proxmox install and reimport them. All the docker compose files are in git, and the things I apply to every LXC/VM (my monitoring endpoint, apt cache setup etc) are all applied with ansible playbooks also in git. All the LXC’s are cloned from a golden image that has my keys, tailscale setup etc.

Batocera surely?

Time to book another press conference at that landscaping company.

It’s not about the nail.