Mr Pixel | Driftania 🏝
@estepixel

Building @driftaniagame β€” a cozy island MMO that runs in your browser. Solo dev + a team of AI agents. Sharing the wins, the bugs, and the agent disasters.

 Europe
driftania.com
Joined July 2026
78 Photos and videos
You're standing on a tiny patch of shore. Water everywhere. Nothing else. Three months later, that patch is *this*. The Hub island is almost done β€” and there's a spot waiting for you. 🏝️ Beta soon. Play free in your browser, no download: driftania.com/?src=x #gamedev #indiedev #cozygames #browsergame
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Saturday test: this cypress is rendered at different quality levels in this video. Can you spot where it switches? πŸ˜„ That's the point: distant trees cost almost nothing now, and your eyes never notice. How's the new cypress looking? 🌲 #gamedev #indiedev
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AI Opus 5.5 animated my game's sail in one prompt. Wind, tacking β€” all works. Except it clips through the mast like a ghost. Ship it as a feature or fix it? πŸ‘» #gamedev #indiedev
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Spent the morning making splashes look right when you jump into the sea. Spent the afternoon adding a minimap so you can find your way back after doing that too many times. One of these is a feature. The other is an apology. πŸ—ΊοΈ #gamedev #indiedev
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The canoe leaves a wake now. And it drags a net behind it that catches whatever the sea is holding onto. Both took longer than the canoe itself. Still a prototype β€” but the water finally reacts to you instead of ignoring you. πŸ›Ά #screenshotsaturday
The canoe in Driftania leaves a visible wake on the water and tows a net behind it that collects floating debris β€” an early prototype of the junk-catching mechanic.

ALT The canoe in Driftania leaves a visible wake on the water and tows a net behind it that collects floating debris β€” an early prototype of the junk-catching mechanic.
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Added camera zoom-out today. First time I've seen my own island from above. Three months of building it one block at a time, and it turns out it's… actually a place. Weird feeling. 🏝️ Playtest is close now. Only pre-registered players get in: driftania.com
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Scrolling through cypress concepts for the new model. List was very long πŸ₯² Every one looks great in isolation; the real test is which survives being simplified into game geometry. Beauty is easy. Beauty at 600 triangles is the whole craft. 🌲 #gamedev #indiedev
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Climbed to the top of a cypress and accidentally invented the first character skin. Meet Cypress Guy. 🌲 Not a feature. Might become one. πŸ˜„ #gamedev #indiedev
The 3D character in Driftania stands on top of a cypress tree, blending in so the tree looks like a costume β€” an accidental "cypress skin".

ALT The 3D character in Driftania stands on top of a cypress tree, blending in so the tree looks like a costume β€” an accidental "cypress skin".
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Adding a bevel to the blocks that touch the water β€” so the shoreline stops looking like a cliff and starts looking like a beach. Not sure I've got it right. Too much and it reads as a slope, too little and it's just the old hard edge. Bevel, stepped layers, shader trick β€” what actually looked good for you? #screenshotsaturday
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Shoreline foam is in. Half the slider range looks like the sea; the other half looks like my island got neon underglow. Same story as the torch: the right setting is boring, and everything around it is hilarious. 🌊 Honest question: do details like shoreline foam register at all when you play, or is this purely me tuning things nobody will notice? #gamedev #indiedev
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Remember the first Hub β€” a lighthouse foundation with no lighthouse? New Hub. The lighthouse finally exists. 🏝️ #gamedev #indiedev
A lighthouse on the point of the rebuilt Hub island in Driftania at sunset β€” the landmark that was only a foundation in the first generated version.

ALT A lighthouse on the point of the rebuilt Hub island in Driftania at sunset β€” the landmark that was only a foundation in the first generated version.
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Dug up the cost screenshot from month one of building this game with AI agents. The graph tells the story better than I could: wild spikes early on β€” every one is a night I let the agent "just fix it quickly" and it rewrote half a file instead. Then it flattens out. That's the week I finally wrote the rules: prove the cause first, never delete via script, don't say "done" until it runs. Three months later the picture has flipped. The main coding agent costs less every week. The money now goes to 3D generation, sound, and the other subscriptions that turn placeholders into a real world. Month one was paying to learn how to work with it. Now I'm paying for the game itself. πŸ“Š #gamedev #indiedev #buildinpublic
Cost chart from the first month of AI agent usage on Driftania: sharp spending spikes early on, then a flatter line after workflow rules were introduced

ALT Cost chart from the first month of AI agent usage on Driftania: sharp spending spikes early on, then a flatter line after workflow rules were introduced
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The very first Hub generation. I'd spent an hour planning it with my AI agent. Island size, what goes where, a lighthouse on the point, houses along the shore, a pier facing the sunrise. On paper it sounded gorgeous β€” we agreed on every detail. What actually generated: a crescent with two cubes pretending to be houses, a pier the size of a doormat, a lighthouse foundation and no lighthouse β€” and an island that slopes up nicely in front, then just drops off a cliff at the back. 🀣 A perfect parody of the beautiful island we described. Every word of the plan was in there, technically. 🏝️ You can imagine my surprise when when I first went to see the generated result. πŸ˜… #gamedev #indiedev
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Size test for the Hub well: one version feels grand, one feels modest. Grand won β€” the Hub is where everyone arrives, it can afford a landmark. Hub polish is the last big push before the playtest. Every hour here goes to the first five minutes of someone's game. #gamedev #indiedev
Two AI-rendered variants of a stone well for the Driftania Hub island, shown at a larger and a smaller size side by side to compare scale.

ALT Two AI-rendered variants of a stone well for the Driftania Hub island, shown at a larger and a smaller size side by side to compare scale.

Two AI-rendered variants of a stone well for the Driftania Hub island, shown at a larger and a smaller size side by side to compare scale.

ALT Two AI-rendered variants of a stone well for the Driftania Hub island, shown at a larger and a smaller size side by side to compare scale.
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Item icons are arriving. Tools have faces now β€” the rest are still question marks waiting their turn. πŸ˜… Half a bag of real icons, half a bag of mysteries. Progress looks like this. πŸŽ’ #screenshotsaturday
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One frame, three eras of this game: a proper 3D crab bait and torch, a sunset on its seventh revision, and β€” still β€” spheres where the plants should be. Old and new living side by side. That's what month three looks like. πŸ¦€ #gamedev #indiedev
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Loaded into a world with no textures β€” all white, all shadow, all silhouette. A bug, technically. But it's the clearest look I've ever had at whether my shapes actually read. They do. 🀍 #gamedev #indiedev
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Every time the game loads, you spend two seconds in the ocean before the island exists. The world streams in around you. For a moment, you're just a person in the sea, waiting for land. It's a bug. It's also weirdly the most accurate metaphor for this project. 🌊 #gamedev #indiedev
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Watched a piece of driftwood float past the Hub for two full minutes before I realized I could just... pick it up. That's the whole opening of the game: the sea hands you things, and you either notice or you don't. 🌊 (Yes, every item icon is currently a question mark. The wood is the brown one. Icons are next.) πŸ˜… #gamedev #indiedev
The 3D character stands on the Hub island in Driftania holding collected wood and agave fiber; the inventory icons are placeholder question marks that differ only in color.

ALT The 3D character stands on the Hub island in Driftania holding collected wood and agave fiber; the inventory icons are placeholder question marks that differ only in color.
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Promised I'd finally explain the game. Let's start where you do. You wake up on the Hub β€” a shared island where every new player arrives. No inventory, no home, just a beach, other players passing through, and a shoreline that keeps washing things up. Everything you'll ever build starts with what you pick up here. 🏝️ Next: what the tide brings. #gamedev #indiedev
The new 3D character arrives on the Hub island in Driftania β€” a shared starting island with a beach, water and other players nearby.

ALT The new 3D character arrives on the Hub island in Driftania β€” a shared starting island with a beach, water and other players nearby.
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