It is absolutely wild seeing people who do not know how to code building and shipping computer games.

This kind of language is fascinating/terrifying:

> I assume doing all this computationally is more processor-intensive than using pre-rendered monsters, but it’s very smooth for me on both desktop and phone, so it must not be too intensive. I guess I’ll hear from people if it’s choppy on their device.

I think the nature of our profession as coders is in process of shifting very rapidly, from "write code to do something useful" to "write code to do something useful, better than I could vibe code myself".

Feels like the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.

On the other hand, as someone who can code in certain domains (web, maps), I could definitely see myself vibe coding as a way to quickly create something in a domain where I have no expertise (eg, Unity).

You may not be able to code, but the fact that you identified the need for asset editor tooling ("lab") entirely on your own, and built and used it successfully tells me you'd probably make a great engineer.

You also invented a movement control method I have never seen before - please keep making games.

I’m not impressed by ChatGPT writing the code for this game. The author has beyond average vision and taste. I’m excited to see what other creative little geniuses will be able to do when these tools get better and cheaper. I think creatively we are living a moment comparable to the introduction of portable 35mm cameras in the 1920s.

> I had ChatGPT build labs with sliders that I could adjust to decide how I want things to appear, instead of getting frustrated with the chatbot.

Your very own Steve Jobs Roll Your Own Calculator Construction Set[1].

(It is of course very common to do all sorts of game art using ad hoc parametric stuff like this, I just find the similarity amusing.)

[1] https://www.folklore.org/Calculator_Construction_Set.html

Is this inspired by Death by Scrolling, the upcoming video game by Ron Gilbert?

https://www.grumpygamer.com/deathbyscrolling5/

Even the fire effect coming after you looks similar.

Damn this hit me in a weird spot. The game looks fun, but the fact that you said "i cannot code" and managed to pull this off with sloppy ai is really scary.

I know this is just fun and games, but i cant even start to imagine what the code is like.

Finally, a game that accurately simulates my daily productivity. I open it intending to play for 5 minutes and somehow 3 hours later I'm still there, having accomplished nothing useful, with a vague sense of dread and the feeling that demons are chasing me. The verisimilitude is uncanny.

Would love an option to adjust the "mouse sensitivity", and flicking(is that the right term? I mean that the momentum from scrolling continues even if you lift your finger from the screen). Right now movement feels a mite heavy, I'm scrolling like three times as much as I'd find comfortable.

Aside from that, this might become my new favorite time waster of the week.

I used ai to make a simple game for a hackathon:

you are an ai gathering training data

its a bit like warioware with an extremly annoying soundtrack

https://vibeware.vercel.app/

came 2nd! thanks claude

This reminds me of the old Mac shareware game BOOM, which is a (very well made) Bomberman clone with Doom assets. I would recommend anyone who likes Doom or Bomberman to try it!

Proof for there being still some pretty simple ideas to be explored. – Well done.

The game Is genuinely great even tho I think there's something off with the slide sensitivity.

Also, this is the first time I'm genuinely impressed by some LLM coded output, bravo to both you and chatgpt.

I crashed it by dying at the same time as getting a 100-kill power up (chrome, iOS)

I just Doomscrolled 1878 meters and killed 3482 monsters. How far can you get?

Great game! Few impressions of the gameplay - Way easier on laptop compared to mobile; the monsters still spawn at the bottom of the viewport so you can camp at the top much further away on a laptop - The game almost gets easier the more powered up you get. To make it more challenging you could consider speeding up the lava at the top

I found a way to cheat. The fire which is meant to force you doom scroll actually disappears if you scroll down then back up. This means that you can just chill out in the “easy area” and get your powerups and kills. Scrolling down (doomscrolling) is not mandatory.

Hi! I’m late to the conversation and maybe this will be buried too far to notice, but as the person who made this game I’ve really enjoyed reading all the comments and thought I’d address some of them. In no particular order:

* Yes the game is easier on taller screens where you can see more of the game at once. I considered making gameplay literally identical everywhere by scaling it or capping the size, but this way felt more in the spirit of real doomscrollable content, since web pages are taller on different devices.

* The game is not inspired by Ron Gilbert’s upcoming Death By Scrolling, which I only just learned about and am relieved to see is not the same concept. But I’m a Ron Gilbert fan and can’t wait to play it.

* Yes, you can cheat the Wall of Fire, as people noticed. It’s not constantly present. Once it’s a certain distance behind you (I think 20m), it’s not in memory anymore and won’t chase you. It only shows up again if you remain within the same 10m area (+/- 5m) for 7 seconds or longer. So if you move up and down enough, it won’t come.

* A few people have commented about the scrolling speed and momentum. I actually worked on this, it wasn’t up to the LLM to decide. I had the LLM make a config file with parameters I could tweak for top speed, friction, momentum, acceleration, deceleration, etc., and played with it until I was happy with it on my devices. But I did play on a borrowed device and it had a slightly different feel. So it may feel different on your device or perhaps you just would have preferred different settings. I don’t know if an experienced coder would have written it in a way that is a better experience across all devices to begin with, or if play testing would have helped me identify cross-device differences I could still fix with vibe coding.

* A little more behind-the-scenes because it seems like people here might enjoy more details: I set the sprite baseline for the first monster’s animation at the bottom so it would “bounce” properly, and this made it so the collision box wasn’t placed right because the code kept using the sprite bottom as the center of the collision box. The LLM had a really hard time understanding that the box should match the sprite and I spent a lot of time struggling with it. So for debugging purposes, I made it possible to reveal the collision boxes by typing the ! (exclamation point). I left that in and you’re welcome to toggle that if you feel like it. It also exposes the collision box for webs so I could determine how much they should overlap before getting caught in a web.

* Another debugging thing: I needed to be able to trigger a weapon upgrade manually so there’s a hotkey for that. It’s not too hard to find but shhh no cheating.

* Someone noted that this feels like “the painful transition when professional photographers started having to differentiate themselves from whatever people could do with their own phone.” I was a professional photographer working in NYC during the commoditization of photography and I 100% relate to this. “Why should I pay you $800 for a photo that my nephew can take for $50?” was the sort of thing we heard a lot. Photography hasn’t recovered. I successfully pivoted to video.

* This isn’t my first vibe coded game or my first time on Hacker News. So if you found this interesting, you should sign up for my newsletter: https://ironicsans.ghost.io

Thanks everyone!

This is awesome!

Finally camped by the health and was rewarded with...one health.

Kept hoping the +spread would shoot closer to down.

That was a lot of fun, and far too addictive to play on a weekday!

I feel like you are forced to get the power upgrades at first to get past the larger roadblocks before the fire wall hits you, but maybe this is avoidable if you're fast enough.

Love to see that people are able to create games without technical barriers. Being able to bring your ideas to life is such a powerful thing and it's great that more people can experience that

> Can a game work where all you do is scroll?

Yes. MVP: <https://sc.rollc.at/>

Really nice. Cool mechanic. I wish it was a little bit harder, though. At 2000m, I just sort of got bored, because the weapon was so powered up that all of the enemies died instantly.

very cool. ik you built it with ai but do you have the code public ? Really want to check it out.

This is a genius little game. Haven't had this much silly fun since Captain Comic days.

OMG this is a great game! Simple and addicting, congrats!

Clever idea, this is why indie games are so fantastic. They explore ideas that no studio would touch, until...

Lava is a nice touch. And the backscroll feels like a cheat code tbh

Great game! I like the share button copying to clipboards ha ha.

Strangely compelling. Nice idea

Am I the only one who finds in bad taste to use "Epstein victims demand release ..." in the game? Is rape and pedophilia already normalized and I didn't notice?

a good start! (reminds me of a simpler, bullet-hell variant of absolute legend "Doug Dug")

Kind of concerning what a non- programmer can do with vibe coding... On the other hand, it's somewhat reassuring that the game is clearly missing scroll inertia/momentum. I guess he didn't yet get the language model to do it for him.

Cool, but I came across a headline for some reason about Charlie Kirk and wondered what the hell that was about, I left the game shortly after.

Pretty fun. I enjoyed.

Cool!

Fun!

I'm honestly impressed. I've seen many early games where countless concepts were tried (with mixed results) and you've found something entirely new with extra points for it's extreme simplicity.