The Hypothesis
Can the Layer team ship a persistent, mobile-first space strategy game - not an instance-based skirmish, not a single-player demo, but one shared galaxy designed to scale to hundreds of thousands of users - using Claude Code and Layer's full platform? And, more importantly: can Layer's 2D image generation be pushed past flat sprite art into the foundation of a systemic 3D universe, where every planet and star is a generated image rendered as a 3D body? And can the in-game economy be run not by scripted NPCs, but by autonomous agents with distinct personalities — with the architecture in place to swap algorithmic agents for LLM-driven ones?
The Agentic Process
Claude Code helped us bootstrap the entire codebase: a Svelte 5 mobile-first SPA, an Express 5 backend with Drizzle and Postgres, a deterministic combat and scan engine, a server-authoritative real-time architecture with REST mutations and WebSocket push, and a custom content editor that lets the designer iterate game data without shipping code. Layer generated every visual: 300+ unique planets, a complete set of Hertzsprung–Russell spectral-class stars, ship-class silhouettes across pickets / destroyers / light cruisers, and faction-leader portraits - all locked to a custom "Mid-century futurism meets anime megastructure" style. Assembling the 2D-to-3D pipeline was the primary goal of this project: Rather than generating 3D models directly, we rendered each celestial body as a 2D image, and the client maps it onto a sphere and lights it in-engine. The result is a galaxy view that feels 3D while the asset pipeline stays fast and cheap, scaling to hundreds of worlds without bespoke modelling. On top of that, four trader archetypes — cartel brokers, independent traders, faction suppliers, and scavenger networks — run the commodities market. Each reads price history and volume signals, holds positions, and reacts to market shifts. Decisions are deterministic today, but the MarketAgent interface is architected so an LLM-driven wrapper can drop in behind the same contract — flipping one config flag swaps the implementation.
The Outcome
Galactic Conflict shipped with 300+ unique generated worlds projected as 3D bodies, seven spectral-class stars, a modular ship-variant system, faction-leader portraits, a server-authoritative scan-and-territory loop, and a persistent commodities market driven by four trader archetypes with distinct personalities — with the agent interface architected for an LLM-driven layer. The art pipeline that would traditionally need a 3D modeling team and a long production runway was replaced by a Layer-driven 2D-to-3D system that turns one generated image into one world, and scales as far as the procedural galaxy needs to go.
