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Fraterkes 1 days ago [-]
Miss the days where these kinds of posts were a jumping off point for technical discussions about gamedev. Guess learning that people use a whole stack of LLMs for these kinds of projects now is also interesting.
xnx 1 days ago [-]
I was never interested in gamedev, but I am interested in gameplay design.
GenAI lets me toy with gameplay design without having to first spend a lot of time mucking with code or assets.
Sydrik 22 hours ago [-]
I get it. While I have been coding since I was in school, if it takes too long to ship, the grand outcome is... no game.
Moving forward though, I hope that AI will be better integrated only in areas that it should be – like forming up logic, building proper scaffolding and infrastructure, debugging, optimizing code... and even when art is involved, I hope it evolves from GenAI to operating within human-operated graphics software. That said, I believe that GenAI does not create. It replicates or meshes together the already known. I hope us humans would rely on GenAI at its correct level.
But I am glad you produced this game – GenAI or not. If it is fun to play, it has done its work!
nextaccountic 17 hours ago [-]
> and even when art is involved, I hope it evolves from GenAI to operating within human-operated graphics software
People use such Artist-integrated tools since 2022. For example, Krita or Photoshop plugins etc. Not all AI art is just prompting until the model gets it mostly right
Fraterkes 1 days ago [-]
I'm sorry if this came off as overly dismissive, I enjoy people posting stuff they're passionate about on hn, even if I don't necessarily like everything I see.
luxpsycho 1 days ago [-]
Owning a domain for 13 years before actually doing the project is the most relatable thing.
1 days ago [-]
jonwinstanley 1 days ago [-]
Hahaha I’ve recently been looking at a few domains I’ve owned forever too.
But do I really want to start more projects?!?
shermantanktop 24 hours ago [-]
If you don’t start new ones, will you really finish the unfinished ones? Really?
It’s ok to admit that the beginning is the most fun.
thisislife2 1 days ago [-]
And unfortunately also a smart move - it is so difficult to find a good domain name now because domain reselling has become such a huge business now. I wouldn't be surprised to find every word in the english dictionary is now a parked domain with ads, and a link to buy or bid for the domain.
gosen 1 days ago [-]
It's pretty fun! I can see a lot of "AI-markers" in the assets, but these things can be improved over time. The concept and mechanics are quite cool, keep it going!
pawelwentpawel 1 days ago [-]
Yep the assets were all generated, cat faces were the hardest one to get "right". Glad you had fun & thank you!
gosen 1 days ago [-]
Building creative parts of games is actually the most difficult part with AI, it's usually very sloppy and I had to do many iterations to make it less "AI-looking" because AI can't be creative :D
rishi_devan 1 days ago [-]
Was a lot of fun. What's the server backend built in? NodeJS?
pawelwentpawel 1 days ago [-]
I think I flew next to you haha, happy you liked it! Yep it's all Node.js + Websockets + Rapier, front-end is mostly Three.js
adzm 1 days ago [-]
Please add a full screen button for mobile!
pawelwentpawel 1 days ago [-]
Roger that, thanks for feedback!
andai 1 days ago [-]
Fun game. It works on my phone too.
You said it took a week? Would love to hear more about the development and how it works, I've been struggling with a 2D browser game for a while (especially the netcode), there's so much that goes into it!
pawelwentpawel 24 hours ago [-]
Thanks! To respond to your questions - there is a lot indeed. I think the trick was reusing the same techniques I used before (materials, shaders, colours, light setups and much more) from my previous project (https://flat.social - spatial audio and video in 3d, much more complex). I reused a lot of already optimised elements from there and the general look & feel that took me quite a lot of time to arrive at.
Also lots of props to Opus 5.5 - it was incredibly good at getting the right game play feel from the start. Some of the quirks it came up with were actually quite funny (try swimming, it's annoying but cute). Ironically I suggest trying dropping large prompts that might be even slightly too vague. The first version of the pterodactyl was literally me saying something like "let's drop a pterodactyl there guarding an atomic bomb". It came up with a pretty good version of it which then I have later calibrated.
All together, it felt much more like an art direction task than a technical one (and I've been programming since I was 12).
algorr 1 days ago [-]
How were the cat’s movements such as its flight the motion of its wings or propeller and its head movements created? did the ai generate pre-made animation clips or are the movements calculated in realtime via code?
11 hours ago [-]
pawelwentpawel 1 days ago [-]
They're not fully procedural - AI has rigged and created motion for the bodies. The propellers should have some motion blur too.
adzm 1 days ago [-]
Would be cool if the default game mode changed when there were enough players; I think everyone goes into the catnip mode just because it is default, no one is ever in the other modes!
avereveard 1 days ago [-]
Popups popups everywhere
modinfo 1 days ago [-]
This is fun and nice idea for a multiplayer game, but will be cool if you open sourced it.
But, still good work.
throwitaway222 1 days ago [-]
OP: Keep your IP. Keep building it.
RugnirViking 23 hours ago [-]
Very busy ui. Mmo levels of stuff vying for the players attention
jnellis 1 days ago [-]
Doesn't seem to work in firefox. Probably my old pc. CPU pegged on chrome version.
SwiftyBug 1 days ago [-]
Works fine for me in Firefox.
pawelwentpawel 1 days ago [-]
Firefox is my nemesis, will test thanks for letting me know!
jnellis 1 days ago [-]
Here's the console output. It get's stuck at 72%... "painting or something" on progress bar.
I tried and played it, but I died so many times :)
It's a lot of fun btw!
tracerbulletx 1 days ago [-]
Was kind of hoping this would be more like SWAT Kats
Fizz43 20 hours ago [-]
The core gameplay is so 'bad'. It looks and feels like a mobile game slop you'd see in a shady popup ad. The guns seen to have broken physics, the movement has input lag. I guess the idea of cat copters fighting is cool but there needs to be refinement to the core mechanics.
Maybe thats just the state of web games and they're all like this.
GenAI lets me toy with gameplay design without having to first spend a lot of time mucking with code or assets.
Moving forward though, I hope that AI will be better integrated only in areas that it should be – like forming up logic, building proper scaffolding and infrastructure, debugging, optimizing code... and even when art is involved, I hope it evolves from GenAI to operating within human-operated graphics software. That said, I believe that GenAI does not create. It replicates or meshes together the already known. I hope us humans would rely on GenAI at its correct level.
But I am glad you produced this game – GenAI or not. If it is fun to play, it has done its work!
People use such Artist-integrated tools since 2022. For example, Krita or Photoshop plugins etc. Not all AI art is just prompting until the model gets it mostly right
But do I really want to start more projects?!?
It’s ok to admit that the beginning is the most fun.
You said it took a week? Would love to hear more about the development and how it works, I've been struggling with a 2D browser game for a while (especially the netcode), there's so much that goes into it!
Also lots of props to Opus 5.5 - it was incredibly good at getting the right game play feel from the start. Some of the quirks it came up with were actually quite funny (try swimming, it's annoying but cute). Ironically I suggest trying dropping large prompts that might be even slightly too vague. The first version of the pterodactyl was literally me saying something like "let's drop a pterodactyl there guarding an atomic bomb". It came up with a pretty good version of it which then I have later calibrated.
All together, it felt much more like an art direction task than a technical one (and I've been programming since I was 12).
THREE.BufferGeometry.toNonIndexed(): BufferGeometry is already non-indexed. 3mykc1x1fjgyq.js:5:331 WEBGL_debug_renderer_info is deprecated in Firefox and will be removed. Please use RENDERER. 1ydg98ua2yutx.js:2:5381 WebGL context was lost. 1ydg98ua2yutx.js:2:5532 THREE.WebGLRenderer: KHR_parallel_shader_compile extension not supported. 3mykc1x1fjgyq.js:5:331 Script terminated by timeout at: ld@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... L@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... lU/this.getUniforms@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... this.renderBufferDirect/y<@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... this.renderBufferDirect@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... i@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... i@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... i@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... i@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... i@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... l1/this.render@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... this.render@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2... render@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:5... render@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:5... render@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/2d2hov5bowo-5.js:4... warm@https://catcopter.com/_next/static/chunks/0_l59d-9nj-se.js:2... 2d2hov5bowo-5.js:2319:8599
Maybe thats just the state of web games and they're all like this.