Fancy Pants was actually one of my refs while I was figuring out what I could try learning to draw and what I could realistically pull off in limited time :) Ah, I miss the golden age of Flash games...
And yeah, agreed about the Press Any Button screen and the splash screens. I ve already added a skip button with a tiny joke, but as far as I know, we cant patch the build during voting yet :( More levels are definitely possible, but I want to finish the missing animations first. Thats not exactly a quick process, especially since I ve only just started learning it.
About AI: yeah, thats fair, and I probably should explain its use on those project pages more clearly.
SoS: AI was used for some backgrounds, which we then edited, because we could not find an artist. It also helped with the EN localization, together with Google Translate and a lots of manual rewriting.
GalaxyMiner was more of an experiment that went much further than I originally intended. I started with working JavaScript code from my very first project, written in vanilla JS without any libs, and reused my old vector icon generator.
Then I decided to experiment with Claude. I only wanted some help adding bloom, cleaning up the UI outlines and filling in the missing art. Instead, it completely redid most of the CSS, averaged everything out into a much more generic style and made the project look like everything else. My original UI was rough, but I was fine with that. I had also made several vector icons myself when made this project. They are still in there you can spot them because they are the wonkiest ones :D Claude redrew some of them and used those as a basis for the rest of the missing art. I took the experiment even further and used AI to rearrange some of my own music. Then, during one of the iterations, I noticed that Claude had also changed parts of the gameplay I had never asked it to touch. By the end I felt completely disconnected from the project and from why I was making it. Since it was only a one-week experiment, I decided not to rebuild everything from scratch. I kept it as a reminder of what happens when I let a tool make too many creative decisions for me.
That experience is actually a big part of why I decided to draw everything here by myself, despite having basically no drawing experience. None of the art in this game is AI generated. It is rough and unfinished in places, but it feels like mine, and I had much more fun making it.
I have nothing against AI itself. It is incredibly helpful for learning, analysis, localization and technical work, even some drafting or help with a brainstorming (as a mirror talking). Just trying to keep it away from every creative things now.
Sorry for the long read, and thanks again for the thoughtful feedback :)