In-game screenshot of DizyCraft: a medieval village seen from above — stone Town Hall with a blue flag, thatched house, lumber mill, guard tower, a wall line, tilled farm plot with a peasant farming, knights on horseback and a wooden catapult mustered below, surrounded by forest with fog of war. Retro browser-RTS pixel style. (Real screenshot uploaded as content/images/my-ai-built-a-warcraft-style-rts-in-one-afternoon.jpg)

"But does it make a sound when the farm build finishes? HECK YEAH!!"

Yesterday I typed one sentence into my AI assistant: "Make me a website-playable version of the old PC game Warcraft."

One afternoon later, warcraft.dizydiz.com is a real, playable RTS. Peasants mine gold and chop lumber. Fog of war, minimap, A+ pathfinding. An orc AI that runs its own economy, advances through three Ages, and marches knights and catapults at your town. About 2,400 lines of vanilla JavaScript — no game engine, no downloaded assets, every sprite drawn in code. It runs in a Docker container on my basement server for $0/month. A few web gaming hours were spent...

Building it wasn't the impressive part. DEBUGGING it was.

I playtested. The AI fixed. Thirteen versions shipped in one afternoon:

- My peasants walked to the gold mine and froze. The arrival check measured distance to the building's CENTER — a spot the pathfinder can never reach. Classic geometry bug, found from my one-line bug report. - The fix "didn't work" — because Cloudflare was still serving the broken build from its edge cache. The AI caught it red-handed (cache HIT, age: 37 minutes) and added version stamps so we'd never argue with a cache again. - Workers gridlocked depositing gold at the Town Hall. It solved it the way Warcraft II actually did: harvesting workers don't collide with each other. - Then I said "add Age of Empires flavor". It researched AoE's real mechanics and rebuilt the whole economy: harvested food, farms that go fallow and auto-reseed, Houses for population, researchable Ages gating Knights, Walls and Catapults.

Here's the part that gets me: it tested its own patches before deploying — spinning up a headless browser, commanding peasants around, and asserting the gold counter actually went up.

Also, buildings 'fart' when they collapse now. The kids requested it. Honestly? Best feature in the game.

The lesson: a human playtester + an AI developer is an absurdly fast loop. I reported bugs in plain English; verified fixes were live in minutes.

Go play it: https://warcraft.dizydiz.com — the first orc wave hits at 4:25, so get your farms up early.