How "Minecraft in space" became a real father-son game

It started with a simple idea at the dinner table. My 10-year-old son, Justus, had a very precise vision for his dream game: "Minecraft, but in space. With self-built spaceships, procedurally generated planets, and base building."

As an IT professional, I thought the idea was fantastic – but I also knew that, alongside my full-time job, I simply didn't have the time to write thousands of lines of code for a game engine in the evenings.

The solution? We bring artificial intelligence into the team.

We set up the project in a rather unconventional way from day one: Justus is the game designer and product manager with the big vision. I'm the "technical director" who sets the architectural guidelines. We let AIs like Claude, ChatGPT, and ElevenLabs generate the actual tedious work (C# code, 3D models, sound effects).

The most exciting thing about our daily life in the "development studio" is the creative process. Justus's head is full of fantastic ideas, but when you're building a game, you need precise rules.

If he wants a new feature—let's say a new warp drive for the spaceships—we sit down together and design it properly. How fast should the ship go? What resources are needed for the crafting recipe? What happens if you crash it into an asteroid?

It's incredibly fun to watch him transform his initial daydreams into concrete game mechanics and logic trees, which we then feed to the AI as prompts. And when his imagined feature suddenly works in the game five minutes later, the joy is immense.

Over the past few weeks, a rough sketch sketched at the dining table has evolved into a real, playable beta. In this devlog, we'll regularly take you along on our journey and show you what's happening behind the scenes.

Welcome to Blocks Beyond the Stars !