Space Invaders But Make It Emoji
This time I wanted more focus on the visual stylings - going for that sweet spot where performance meets playful aesthetics.
I’m not a super visually creative person in the traditional sense (can’t draw to save my life), but there’s something magical about performant visual juice - it lets you do more with less and reach people who couldn’t normally play your game.
Development Highlights
Key stats:
- Development time: 1 hour
- Number of calls: 61
- Tokens: 322.8k sent, 38.5k received.
- Way too many of those tokens were burned trying to generate interesting CSS noise patterns.
The AI excelled at:
- Smooth emoji animations that just work
- Particle effects for those sweet explosions
- Responsive design tweaks
- Performance optimizations to keep it zippy
While I focused on:
- Visual cohesion despite my non-artist tendencies
- Game feel polishing (even if v3 still has some angy vibes)
- Accessibility through lightweight design
- Embracing constraints - emojis and opengameart.org baybeeee
The Visual Feast
Lessons Learned
- Emojis are useful - Instant visual appeal without asset loading headaches
- Performance = accessibility - Fast loading means more people can enjoy your creation
- Constraints breed creativity - Couldn’t make noise effects work? Emojis to the rescue!
- Animation is cheap - Those little motion details make it feel alive, and it only takes a few lines of code
Future Directions
Ideas to explore:
- Mobile functionality
- Multi-directional shooting
- Emoji power-ups
- Dynamic backgrounds
- Local multiplayer mode
Also I’m having V3 write this for me in aider and it’s not good. I need to explore better workflows, and maybe different models.