Behind the Game
About
One person, a few evenings, and a love for classic RTS games.
Meet the Human in the Loop
Adam Sturrock
I co-founded Moltin in 2013, one of the first headless eCommerce platforms, before “headless” was even in the technology vocabulary. We attracted thousands of developers and businesses, raised over £10m in angel and VC funding, and successfully exited in late 2019.
Since then, I've been building. At RetailerBoost, we've helped 1,000+ Shopify stores drive $11M+ in sales through performance-based Google Shopping campaigns. We front the ad spend and merchants only pay when orders come in.
Shards of Stone is a passion project and a love letter to the RTS games I grew up playing. Warcraft II, Age of Empires, StarCraft. The kind of games that don't really get made anymore. I wanted to see if one person with modern tools could change that.
The Process
1
Developer
Solo project, start to finish
~20 min
Per Session
An evening here and there
5 Months
So Far
And counting
9
Factions
Each with its own roster and tech tree
220+
Units
Ground, air, sea, and siege
320+
Buildings
Bases, defenses, docks, and economy
32
Campaign Missions
Across two voiced campaigns
Shards of Stone is built in short bursts. Roughly 20 minutes in an evening, here and there, for five months now. No team, no studio, no crunch. Just one person with an idea and the discipline to chip away at it. It started as a two-week experiment to see whether a browser RTS was possible at all; it has not stopped since.
The workflow is simple: big brain dump of ideas into Claude Code. Use Plan Mode to think through architecture. Then let sub-agent teams execute ideas in parallel without conflicts. One agent building the combat system while another generates sprites while another writes the AI. Let Claude handle it all.
Google Gemini generates every sprite and piece of artwork. Suno composes the music. ElevenLabs voices every line of dialogue.
Nothing super special here. No special knowledge. No special prompts. The vibe was fully embraced. It's proof that the barrier to building ambitious software has never been lower. The tools exist. The models are good enough. The only thing you need is the vision and the willingness to start.
Tech Stack
Every tool used to build Shards of Stone, from code to canvas to soundtrack.
AI & Generation
Framework & Language
