A YouTube comment sparked today's waffle.
Let's waffle!

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Over on the YouTube clip for this week's game, coolsecrets7065 commented



OK.. Let's go through the game, shall we?

Concept

The gameplay was pretty much my idea, though I did at least bother to ask Claude.ai if it had any ideas for Banana based games. The idea of the spinning bowl of point-pockets came about first, then the idea of throwing fruit from "behind" the pockets seemed to crop up, and then the idea of running around inside the ring with the pockets spinning around the player.

Michael Fernie also chipped in with a couple of ideas. Would be nice if CoolSecrets7065 and other players could also chip in here, from time to time. Make things a little more varied, perhaps.

It actually took me a good number of days before I finally "found" what this game wanted to be, and much as happens in a number of AGameAWeek games, once I'd found that "thing", the whole game finally started to come together.

Code

No A.I. would code this badly

The code was all done by me.

No A.I. assisted in the coding of this game.

The games of AGameAWeek are all mine. Because.. At the end of the day..
It's the coding.
The bit of working out logic, gameplay, fun, amusement, the puzzle of finding fixes, solving problems..
That's the enjoyment that I get from doing AGameAWeek.. That's why I keep doing this.

It's not "to make a bazillion games"
It's all the coding stuff. I really REALLY love doing that.

If the computer did all the coding.. Where would I be?!!
What would I do?
What would be the point of it all?!

Graphics

Honestly, it's not hard!!

The sprites were drawn by hand, or at the very least, by trackpad.. Not by A.I.
As likely as it might be, when you look at the horrors of my games, to think that an A.I.s done all that rubbish. It really hasn't. I did that!!
I really do draw that badly!

I HAVE played about and experimented with A.I. sprites in the past, but they really don't look all that great when blended with my code, or gameplay style. (And they kinda look gnatty when reduced to 32x32 pixel sprites, which I tend to use)

A.I. still has a long long way to go, before it learns to draw sprites as badly as I do.

Sound

Most of the sound/music is generally plucked out at the last minute, because.. for the most part.. I tend to do a lot of the coding with some background music on, and it gets kinda chaotic having music+sound of a game constantly interspersing the music that's playing.
The sounds plucked out of JSE's inbuilt sound library. These are mostly found-sounds that I gathered at the start of the JSE project, but a lot of those were generated by me using a music program (KORG Gadget on iPad).
This game uses a variety of those sounds, from the "beeper" jingles, to some of the Sonniss audio files, and a few explosions.

Music

The music, too, is part of the JSE library, but do remember that JSE's entire music archive was.... created by me. Mostly using the same KORG Gadget on iPad that I used to generate some of the sound effect. For some of the newer tracks, Ableton on MacOS was used, instead. (I upgraded!)

The music used in this game is the track Enigmatically Robust, which is roughly the 45th or so track that I made on my iPad, back in 2014.



And it's still on there, too!

Language

JSE, the actual language itself which the game's coded in.. That's also been created by me.
Since 2021 I've been building up what was originally just a simple script-example language, into a fully blown game-creation monstrosity, which .. Isn't much use for most people, it seems.. but is great for the sorts of games I make.
The language has been created about 95% by myself, though in the past year or so, the various AI chatbots have given me some tips about modern Javascript optimisations that I honestly haven't had the time to learn.

.. It's also given me a shit-ton of terrible advice. It's really bad at doing optimised code.

In fact, other than the original spitballing of ideas, right at the start of this project, the only other thing that "The EVIL A.I.".contributed was that one single image, which you can find in the game's Archive page, as the CoverArt.


This bit is A.I... ... This bit.. This one little bit...

The End Bit

When I get to the end of a project, I have to sit and make screenshots, design a logo, create an icon, and those get bundled together into little Steam Icons, and YouTube Thumbnails.
I then have to record some footage, build a youtube clip, upload the youtube clip, upload the game, upload the screenshots and logos and things to the archive page, write a little blog about it, write blurb for youtube, write social media posts, post to SoCoder and anything else.

Honestly, this is the WORST bit of doing AGameAWeek.
All of a sudden, the enjoyment I get out of making the games, writing the code, creating the exciting things..
That all goes RIGHT out the window.

Now it's "chore-time".

Now it's sitting there for, honestly, what can easily be about 3 or 4 hours out of a day, just clicking and typing into hundreds of stupid text boxes, and entering fields of data, copying links from one place to another, drag and dropping images here there and everywhere.
Oh my god, it's relentless.

And I have to do that EVERY SINGLE WEEK!!!!
Aaaargh!!!!

Once the AI got good enough that I could say "hey, just draw me that one pic, would you?"
Then I started using it more and more for the CoverArt.

"But Jay", I hear you whinge, "You could pay an artist to do that"

Sure, ok.

Ask yourself this. How many of my games have you played?

If, for each one of those, you gave me £1, that's £1 profit that I have that I can spend to have a proper artist do that.

Now ask yourself... .. How many of my hundreds of freeware games have you given me £1 for?

..
And how many of my hundreds of freeware games has anyone ever given me £1 for?

...
And I can pretty much answer that.
7.
Seven "Paid-for" iOS games that sold in minimal amounts.

1 bought a window for the old living room, 1 bought a Mac Mini, and 5 more that probably just about bought a box of noodles between the lot of them.

Now, if you take all that none-money, and give a pittance of it to an artist, and say "Hey, I need this drawn in about half an hour, because even though I only just finished writing the game, I'll be starting to do the uploading of the YouTube video and stuff for this, so need the picture ASAP.. OK?"

And expect them to do that..
.. Every single week...?

Yeah, that's not gonna happen!

Having an AI craft a single little image, within the last 5 or 10 minutes of doing all of this, is a bit of a timesaver. Otherwise I have to stop where I am and spend another hour or so drawing a picture, myself.

If I could have an A.I. agent that could take the screenshots, make the trailer, upload the trailer, write the blurb, upload the game, post a blog..
Would I do that?!
Sure I would.
Abso-bloomin-lutely.

And at the end of the day, any time I get to put back into actually writing games. That would be awesome.

So, bring it on.
Gimme the A.I. stuff.
More of that, please.

A.I. Corner

Lyrics : ChatGPT wrote the lyrics, today. C.B.A.
I copy+pasted everything from the "The End Bit" section of the above blog, popped it into the AI, and asked it to turn it into a 90s Europop Dance Track.
Sound Imported : Enigmatically Robust
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"Cartoon Derek convinces a famous artist to create hundreds of pieces of art for him, for free. "exposure" " by DrawThings / Flux

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