Ai Usage

If you have competed before, how has your game changed?
Yes, and it lost on graphics. Last time out it scored 1.000 on Graphics, 67th of 73.

The reason was worth knowing: it looked AI-made. Cyan and magenta neon on near-black, glow on everything, arcade fonts. That look isn't a style choice, it's what you get when nobody edits the machine, and players clock it in about a second.

So I sat down and worked out what was actually causing it, and it was not one thing. Obstacle glow picked a random hue off the full 360-degree wheel and drifted through all of it, so colour was moving without meaning anything. Forty OS emoji were doing duty as icons, which means the game rendered in three different vendors' art styles depending on your machine. Nineteen rounded corners with gradients and drop shadows. Buttons in sentence case like a Word document. Font stacks falling back to whatever the player's OS had lying around.

Five versions to fix all of it. It is now olive drab and hazard orange, military stencil type, a green field, obstacle glow banded to ember and brass, licensed fonts embedded in the file, and every icon drawn rather than borrowed. Colour lives in the light instead of the paint. The cover art and the store page were rebuilt too, because the old cover promised neon the game no longer delivers.

Gameplay is mostly the same with minor tweaks.

The short version: a machine got it started and a human had to go through it line by line to make it look like anything. That editing pass is the whole difference, and it took longer than building the game did.

What I want from this round is whether the look now reads as deliberate, and whether the controls make sense before you've read anything.

Genre

Rating