How it was made: in an October 31, 2026 essay on the game's site, "A Pickleball Player's Illustrated Primer," the developer says Claude Code wrote all of the code, in GDScript for Godot 4.7, mostly with Opus 5.5; about 22% of replies came from Opus 5 before a switch on September 23. From September 12 to October 17, 2026, the project reached about 1,500 commits, 225,000 lines of game and tool code and 85,000 lines of tests, by the developer's count. The essay reports 24.2 billion input tokens (23.6 billion served from Anthropic's prompt cache) and 18.6 million output tokens, which it prices at about $10,500 at Anthropic's published API rates. That is an API-equivalent figure, not money spent: the developer says a $200-a-month Claude Max plan covered the work. The itch.io page says the 3D characters, scenery, textures, voices, sounds, music and writing also came from AI tools, without naming them. The Godot engine, the fonts, some public-domain field recordings and the piano notes in the music cues were not made with AI.
The developer says automated checks, not reading the code, are what kept a codebase this large manageable. GDScript warnings are treated as errors, a test enforces which folders may depend on which, each of the roughly 2,900 tests was checked against a deliberately planted bug, the win chances shown to players are tested against how often shots actually succeed, and a script screenshots every screen at 57 device sizes. "I wrote none of the code, but it wasn't made from one big prompt either," the developer wrote in the essay; the game grew in small changes as the developer played each build and said what was wrong.
