Simon Willison experimented with Claude Opus 5.5 to compose computer game music, specifically aiming for a style reminiscent of the original *Secret of Monkey Island*. He designed a simple text-based format for the music and built an artifact capable of playing it, including example tracks. The results were surprisingly good, prompting questions about whether this compositional ability is a new capability emerging in recent text models.
Panache is a real‑time strategy game for mobile and browser set in France’s Belle Époque around 1900, featuring steampunk elements such as dirigibles, steam‑powered trucks, armored ships, and marching fortresses. The game was released under an Apache 2.0 license and already has a French‑language fork that reskins it to a steampunk 1900s France, adding an animated intro and French‑twisted music. The updates are mainly aesthetic, with new models and an intro video showcased on the game’s page.
Simon Willison introduces GPT‑6 Astra, a new model that offers improved attention to detail, better prompt comprehension, and the ability to generate more sophisticated outputs. The model excels at creating 3D renderings, producing detailed scenes such as gardens, shipyards, animals, cityscapes, and even Dyson spheres. Willison highlights its whimsical creativity, noting examples like a pelican wearing a red neckerchief riding a bicycle.
Simon Willison discusses a new inflection point in October 2026 for creating video games using AI, noting that Claude Opus 5.5 now reliably produces compelling 3D models, music, and especially game design. He reports having successfully "vibe coded" four enjoyable games without inspecting the code, and highlights that the real challenge is now generating novel, delightful concepts that AI alone could not conceive. The author compares Opus 5.5’s fun factor to GPT‑6 Astra, which he finds lacking in that regard.
Simon Willison demonstrates how to use Blender with coding agents on macOS by installing the full Mac application from blender.org and issuing prompts to ChatGPT Codex. He shows a step-by-step example where the agent renders a scene of a pelican riding a bicycle, then adds background flair and improves the image. The resulting image is generated via Blender's Python API.
The article describes how Jacob Sansbury’s team built a massively multiplayer game called Spawn, where players can prompt an in‑game AI agent, Savi, to modify the world—creating castles, dragons, and more. The development process is fully autonomous, with Fable‑powered agents that read errors, bug reports, and metrics, then directly modify live code and ship changes to production every hour. The system treats any hour without a ship as a severe incident, enabling rapid rollbacks and continuous deployment at a scale that costs over $3 million in AI tokens monthly.