Mr. Phil Games’ Blog

Posts for Tag: sprite sheets

Restart, Rebuild, Recalibrate

After discovering that snake_case had been deeply baked into the project from near the start, I made the tough call to restart Stellar Throne from scratch. Enforcing camelCase from the new CLAUDE.md spec led to unintended breakages — especially thanks to batch Python scripts Claude had run, which mangled filenames and import paths.

Instead of trying to untangle it all, I opted for a clean slate. Painful, yes, but with the speed of agentic tools like Claude, I’m confident I’ll catch back up quickly.

On the bright side: the visuals are already looking better.


✅ What Got Done

  • Rebuilt the star map with newly rendered star and planet sprites

  • Implemented fleet movementHUD overlays, and user notifications

  • Built a new app: SpriteSheetMaker to stitch GPT-generated sprites into clean, aligned sprite sheets

  • Recreated sprite sheets for F-type and G-type stars

  • Began implementing ship construction UI and logic


💡 What I Learned

  • Agentic development makes it easy to justify starting over — dangerously easy. Productivity makes code feel disposable, but discipline matters.

  • GPT still struggles with sprite sheet consistency. The centering is unreliable, so I’m generating one-off sprites and stitching them myself.

  • The starting sector often places the player too far from meaningful targets. I may need to guarantee at least 7 stars and 1 colonizable world within reachable range.


🧱 Still in Progress

  • More star and planet sprite rendering

  • Continued work on ship construction systems