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How did you use AI?
ChatGPT (Astra and 6.1 Sol)
The game is a Turbografx-16 ROM that is then wrapped in an emulator (which has mouse/touch passthrough if you want to use that instead of a gamepad or keys).
I've been using GPT to build a lot of retro homebrew games for famicom, sega genesis, tg-16, etc. I eventually hope to make 3d homebrews as well.
I think AI is really interesting for making software for real legacy hardware where SDKs can be very cumbersome, community documented, etc and so forth. I surely was never going to learn to write assembly to make old games, and AI can find all the SDKs on GitHub so it doesn't have to either.
So the main way "AI was used uniquely" in this game is that I've been pioneering AI homebrew across many projects over this past summer, and this is a continuation of that skill set and my post-trained retro homebrew work environment.
Also as everyone immediately notices, I used AI to create a large graphical wrapper for the itch page, and to extend that wrapper seamlessly onto the game area up til the area where the actual emulator screen is rendered.
List of Team Members (name or pseudonyms)
damijin (solo)
How does your game fit the restriction?
It's about a cat and a robot! Shmoop and Sk1bbl3! Also you can only move.
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Comments
Wow, this is a very cool project! Great use of AI - well done! I love the style, and pixel and retro sound effects and the characters and enemy ships. The game is fun and feels good to play, and I really love the arcade machine image for the page. It's awesome! Is there a way to slow down the emulation slightly? I bet that can be hard to tune. I was having a bit of trouble dodging the bullets on the 3rd boss, but I like the challenge - a great mixture of patience awareness and precision required, and I like that the weapons are very quick to upgrade, nice work! :)
Thank you! I think Lava Tiger is simply not tuned (as well as how easy it is to get to him)
My attention and ability to focus on these projects is pretty fried between being alive in 2026 and "robot now builds whatever I ask for, and I know a lot of game ideas to ask for"
But I also really like this one, so hopefully I will get it to a better balance in the levels and the bosses. I've still never beaten Lava Tiger on NewGame+, so he is definitively *hard*. Perhaps I'll introduce a power-up that spawns if you can destroy the laser pads (right now they're pretty hard to kill also) and that power-up will slow down everything for a little bit. A time dilation power-up just for boss fights that drops from boss minions.
In the meantime, if you really want to beat the tiger, the .pce ROM is available and you can load it into an offline emulator with a slowdown feature! Thank you again for the kind words
Very well polished- the theme on the page is also fantastic and very immersive. The game feels a bit too forgiving and doesn't feel like I need to have any skill involved in playing, which makes it fun in an OP way, but also then the payoff of a game like that would be that it's got incredible visuals and audio design which isn't really here. But as a 1970s retro shooter type game, I can tell a lot of thought and heart went into it. Good job.
I completely agree the ramp up is a bit off.
The boss on level 3 actually gives me some trouble, but the actual levels and first 2 bosses are gimmes.
Part of my thinking was "this genre can be very difficult for some people, but is much easier for others, so I want to make sure even my mom can beat level 1" -- but it can be offputting for anyone who has familiarity with the genre.
If you press down 6 times during the intro sequence it starts the game in New Game+ which makes everything harder. I still haven't beaten the Lava Tiger boss on NG+, but I do think the rest of the game excluding the tiger boss can be a bit tougher.
It's tricky though, free web games, people aren't going to play past their first friction point unless you get them a little bit deep into the game first, but how do you get them in deep without it being too easy? 🤹 Indeed.
Thanks for the comments, and an opportunity to think out loud :)
I don't think anything is wrong with having super inclusive games, you can have a hard mode for players who want a challenge- or an easy mode if you want normal to be hard. I did that with a game of mine where my intention was basically the same as yours- I wanted anyone to be able to play it easily since it was more about the narrative elements, but I made a hard mode for people who actually wanted to "play" the game. Just an option.
Also - my own thoughts here, I think making free web games should be fun for YOU and bring out something inside of you that you get to see in real life (now with the help of ai, anything is possible, right?) thats how I look at it. I am only making games for game jams because I know realistically no one probably is ever gonna play my games except for the few minutes they take to rate it in a jam. Maybe after some time and 50 games later we will make something everyone wants to play!
Your game is good though, and it's really well polished. A lot of love went into it, I'd be proud of it!!!
Thank you. Yeah, the situation with discovery, number of players who exist, number of high quality games that exist, is all very bad for getting things played. We are quickly approaching game devs making games for game devs (itch jam scene, already been the case for many years really)
I do think as the fever of "get rich making games" dies out to "everyone can AI dev a game" there will be more room for those of us working very hard to make something interesting. For me personally I've been making games for 30 years, so it's funny -- I just make them because it's what I do at this point. Like a painter on their Nth painting. I was doing it when players were easier to find and I'll be doing it when it is only us making games for each other.
This also happened in other media. Much music is for other musicians more than the "general public" and "pop" music is considered a relatively small part of the total medium despite being the portion that is most directly commercial. I think something similar is happening for games over the next few decades!
Your comments are so apt! I don't know how the get rich quick scheme will go but there will always be people making things for the love of it, and people making things to get one over on someone else. Nature of being human I would guess. I do think it's interesting you pointing out that game devs make games for game devs- I only started doing this early this summer when I promised myself I would make a game by the end of the year, and now I've made a few and really love it. It's like you said- painting for a painter, it's a great form of self expression.
But yeah- the future is definitely weird.
Page is great, art is great, style of game is known to be great (played it since 1942). Good job!
Thank you! 🙇♂️
I know I didn't push the design envelope very far with this one, but it *is* a real TurboGrafx-16 / PC Engine ROM. So you can download the .pce "Hu-Card" and load it up into a real TG16 or hardware emulator of any sort. It also has mouse passthrough into the ROM while played in this web wrapper (your mouse or touch acts as D-pad inputs), so I did do a little engineer innovation even if the gameplay is definitively "classic."
Thank you again for the kind words!
That's really cool! I had no idea you could actually do that. Impressive stuff!
The game page is lovely, although the text is a little hard to read. The game itself is a little too fast paced for me to be able to reliable dodge and tell when things are coming on the screen that I will need to dodge, but it works well overall. Here is my playthrough:
Thank you so much for the play video!!
I completely agree, there's a lot of low hanging fruit that can be improved, especially the story text and pacing of level 1 / difficulty curve, etc. I actually found out about this jam with like 28 hours left to submit, I slept a bunch and had some other things to do so this was really like a 4 or 6 hour jam effort. I saw the theme and couldn't resist trying to get something done on time :)
Quite fun! I love the retro feel and animations.
Thanks for playing! I was really happy with them too. Not too long ago the systems were much worse at pixel art. I didn't edit any of these, they're pure outputs from Astra.
Reminded me of retro games I used to play. Simple to learn. instantly can get hooked.
Thank you 🙇♂️🙇♂️
Nice retro style and cool concept. I tried to die but it was pretty much impossible with all the power ups I am getting XD, so my little advice to wase up on those to make the game more challenging. Other than that it was a really cool gameplay and magnificient music!
Yeah I wasn't sure how hard to go, shmups are supposed to be tough, but its a jam game so I didn't want to go too hard. It does tend to "autoplay" to the final boss if you leave it alone, so you're probably correct. I will toughen it up a little bit, or add a second mission after you beat the game with much harder difficulty (palette swap, etc).
Thank you for playing!!
I'd like to start by saying how much i love your game's page. What a nice concept to integrate it in such an arcade visual!
And this was so much fun to play as well. I got sucked into the game quite instantly, and had to lock in because it was kind of hard at first. Love it!
With a little more elbow grease I could wrap it and make it fit better for the height and width, but I was jamming up to the deadline!
I love AI for doing these graphical web game wrappers; it was the first thing I realized i could use it for back before they got capable of building entire games. Thank you for playing!
quite clever actually, I never thought to use it this way. I'm mostly a software engineer by trade, so I don't really default to thinking about these art things. This jam is going to teach me a lot! :)