itch.io

I'm fine with that. 👍 I think I've hammered out most of the rough edges, for now, anyway. Largely thanks to everybody else's hard work and feedback. 
Thank you so much for working to make Feedback Quest a reality.

There's a JETPACK!?

That changes EVERYTHING!

Dev, make the game tell you there's a jetpack!

Possible bug: I heard no sound despite the FMOD credits.

I liked the concepts and the visual presentation. The hookshot felt annoyingly limited. I was constantly aiming at the next dune, only for the hookshot to fall short. I also tried to shoot the hookshot at the biggest thing on the map, my crashed ship, and it wouldn't work. Suggestions (ALWAYS take suggestions on fixes from players with a grain of salt) :

- If the player can see it, the player can hookshot it.

- If the player clicks the hookshot button, raycast from the reticle. Wherever it hits is where the hookshot arrow is going to hit.
- If it takes too long for the hookshotarrow to travel that distance, have it snap to its destination after the arrow has traveled the current maximum "button held down" travel time of a typical hookshot attempt.

- If the thing it hit is too far away to do the whole "reel in" effect, just give the player a speed boost in that general direction, then the cable "snaps" and the player can hookshot again.

- If the cable can't be drawn for some reason, due to hills covering up the destination or whatever, same thing. Cable snaps, you travel the direction you were trying to use the hookshot to travel anyway.

- If the spaceship is off-limits because hookshotting onto it "isn't fun" or "breaks the game" or whatever, bury the ship halfway in the sand so it's just another domed hill, mechanically speaking.

Overall: game concept feels good, but hookshotting feels bad. If hookshotting was fun, this could become a good core mechanic to build an experience around.

Edit: If the purpose of the hookshot is just to steer, not to go fast, then you need to teach the player how to go fast. I was schlepping up hills and snowboarding down them, until I discovered the hookshot, and that's apparently not fast enough to not get eaten by a worm.

Edit: I tried to play again, thinking maybe I'd start with a good burst of speed, then use the hookshot to change direction, shalomming back and forth to avoid the worm through agility, not raw speed. Then I thought maybe the hookshot was only meant to climb hills, not for use on flat ground. Then I thought maybe I needed to have the snowboard already out when the hookshot latches on, for maximum speed.

In all possible scenarios, it didn't do what I thought it would do. It was like the laws of physics were just constantly changing to make me slow down and get eaten in a ditch, no matter what I did, no matter how the snowboard reacted at the start of the game.

This thing is frame-rate independent, right? You're using delta-time, not raw update cycles or something, right? Because without frame-rate independence, things like friction and momentum are going to end up being completely different on different user's machines in a physics-driven game like this.

'preciate it! 😀👍

Fixed 2026-09-22

Thanks again!

I feel ridiculous even needing to ask this, but I'm getting desperate. 

I've refined the web version almost as far as I can. The windows build needs the play-testing and feedback the web version got. But most of all, I'm literally improving the downloadable in ways that would increase the file size of the web version to an unreasonable degree.

So I added a rotating ad for the downloadable version of my game to the title screen of the web version of my game.

Is it allowed to do this? Is it a bad idea? Do you suppose it will work? Is it a bad look? It's definitely not a misleading ad. I'm just telling them what I had to cut to make the web version sustainable. (So far, it's closeups of the ships, mip-maps, transparencies and effects that use a lot of fill-rate, that sort of thing.)

I have no idea what I'm supposed to be doing. I just know that what I've been doing so far isn't sustainable indefinitely. 

A game like this needs a demo with twice as much content for a game with like ten times this much content. If I pack it all into the web version, players will churn out before it loads. If I just add it to the downloadable version, not the web version, but I don't say anything about it in places where people are already looking, they won't know that half the demo is missing.

What would you do?

Big news. It took me a long time, but I think I've finally got the game running stable on Chrome.!

The windows version needs more testing. It's just been collecting extra graphical fidelity that would only bloat the web app, for a while now.

If you have time, please check out the latest build. And let me know if it still gets stuck!

I'm using the itch windows app. Not the butler command line tool. The app said it was live. When I played the game, an older version was in-browesr.

The reason I was so certain this time is because I have a mini-devlog on the title screen in my game, and the text at the top was exactly 1 version behind. after I pushed the patch.

It sure feels like this only happens during important bugfixes, but maybe I'm just paying closer attention then. Is there anything I can do to get it up-to-date? Is it just a caching issue on my end, or does this accurately reflect what other users are seeing? And how can I tell the difference?

Hey! Thanks for your suggestions and the bug report.

Please give today's latest hotfix a try.

Instead of chasing you in a giant line, enemies now teleport around you, (albeit at spawn-range.)

So it's less "sitting ducks," more "subway surfers" if you choose to play this way.

I also made some changes under-the-hood that might increase stability.

If you mean something else, please describe what ship you're using and exactly how you play, or upload your own gif. ( itch requires it be <3MB )

I was thinking I must have pushed the wrong zip file or something.

I could have sworn I tested it in-browser, but maybe it was the end of the night and I skipped that step this time.

Thanks for the information! 👍

Hey. 

Because of how the internal code was structured, it took me a while to get around to this, but I've  switched the upgrades menu around so that the short descriptions appear on the cards while you're deciding what to take, and the detailed weapon stats appear in the box below. (I've also adjusted the relative sizes of the cards and the box accordingly.)

Sorry about the one-tap. I've pushed a build that will (hopefully) fix that.

Orthogonal design... that's going to take a while

Thanks. 👍

When I upload a file to itch, does it sometimes take a few days for it to propagate through the network and reach other players? I got two bug reports today about a bug I could have sworn I patched last night.

Patched. I swear I fixed this bug YESTERDAY. I have NO IDEA why or how it's back now. 

Either itch rolled the site back, or I uploaded the wrong zip.

Sorry about that. Runs should last 15 minutes. Tested it in the browser myself.

Huh. 

I feel like I knew this, I did it in a prior game. I just forgot about it.

Patch pushed! I also increased the contrast a bit

Got any more easy ones for me? :D

Update: It turned out the fix for this one was relatively simple, as far as UI bugfixes go, so I just knocked it out real quick.

Enjoy! :D

Heh! Different use of the word "Ranger." I like your enthusiasm, though.

You should see a green bar above your ship at the start of a run. That's your health bar. (I'll admit, it does get a bit buried beneath explosions. I'll see what I can do about improving viability.) You can take 4 hits at the start of a run with no upgrades. Enemy damage increases during the course of a typical run.

Funny you should mention the in-game devlog! I actually just now pushed a build which fixes the scrollbar. If you refresh your browser or restart the itch app, the good news should now be prominently displayed in the in-game devlog, which should scroll using mouse dragging, the mouse scrollwheel, or up and down on a controller (after highlighting the scrollbox, of course.) This was really hard to fix, so let me know if it works on your end!

I'm glad you think it's that good, despite all the bugs. :D

Thanks. I'll look into it when I get time. 👍

I made a pass at improving the webpage. You can check it out here: https://warpzone.itch.io/public-game-002

I've always been told to put the controls at the top of the page and the call-to-action first. But the controls should be in the game anyway, and the call-to-action only works if people already care about the game, which means they've already played it.

Making the animated gifs nearly killed me. The tools worked, they just made files that were too big for itch to allow me to upload them. So I settled on 3 seperate animated gifs with text headings between them explaining what you're looking at in the most hype way I could think of.

Gosh... the only ones I can think of in the last few years are Stellar Blade... that one beat 'em up with the cowgirls in it from itch a few years ago... that spiritual successor to Space Harrier... I'm sure there are some good ones I'm not familiar with? Female Protagonist is a big tag on Steam, and they can't all be shovelware or porn. I just feel like there's not a lot of exposure, weirdly. Youtube's algorithm punishes them, so letsplayers don't play them, so nobody hears about them? That's one theory, anyway.

Side note: I love how we live in a world where Stellar Blade and Neir Automata are dismissed as "gooner games," but literal NSFW game "House Party" was not only covered on Game Grumps, but literally has DLC with Danny and Arin voicing themselves in it.

Oh! Uh... that one chainsaw game! Not Lollipop. The other one. Where you fight a truck.

I played on "hover" mode.

For some reason, it felt like the same room over and over again. Buying upgrades didn't seem to make much difference, since they almost never trigger. Even though the blocks look different and contained different ore, I couldn't detect any mechanical difference, so breaking the blocks all felt the same. Waiting until room 5 or room 473 for an upgrade just feels like torture, and it probably means each run plays the same, since you'll take the upgrades in exactly the same order.

I've played other clickers where the goal is to mine an area by clicking all the tiles. Maybe check out Arcane Earth, which has a lot of ideas I think you could borrow to improve your game. Most significantly: 

• you can buy the upgrades whenever you can afford them
• there are a variety of upgrade paths, including auto-miners that can clear a screen relatively quickly
• the layers are fairly large, with lots of blocks
• sometimes just mining a tile triggers a special effect (magical weather) or you discover treasure (trinkets, rare ores) these all have an immediate impact on gameplay or allow you to buy upgrades sooner.

If your game already has some of these features, you should let the player see them sooner. If I've been playing for several minutes/rooms and nothing's changed, I'll start to think I've seen everything the game has to offer, even if there are still hundreds of rooms to go.

I only played the first level, because the hub area of the second level looked the same as the first level, down to the note about the controls, so I thought it as just level 1 again.

It seemed fine.

Toggling sneaking instead of needing to hold down the shift button would be nice.

If there aren't enough cameras to keep the dog in view at all times, maybe level 2 just needs more cameras?

You can have a monster it's hard to see who can jump out and scare you at any moment, like the Grunts in Amnesia:The Dark Descent, but they're slower than you, or they corner worse than you, or something, so it leads to a chase scene instead of a curb-stomp.  Or else you can have an unstoppable monster like in Alien: Isolation, where careful observation and avoidance is the only option.

Based on CodyBrealey's comments, The Dog in Level 2 seems to be doing both at once: an unstoppable monster that you also can't see (and therefore can't plan around or evade.)

I did 2 menial jobs, and I think I signed up for 1 or 2 quests. I had no idea where to do the quests, so I just entered the dungeon.

All great advice about the hook. I'm still not entirely sure about that specific pitch, though. I'll tell you why.

"Aim manually, mutate every weapon slot, and turn a precision fighter into a screen-filling arsenal," or any reasonable way of paraphrasing that concept, is basically just a description of the Bullet Heaven genre. 

What really made me realize I was in trouble was Steam's Bullet Heaven Fest. Every theme, every art-style, every game budget, every conceivable niche has been occupied. We're in Red Ocean territory. Somebody told me mine was the best of four released in this specific game jam alone.

I even considered throwing waifus at the problem. I threw this together last night, (gee, I wonder what could have inspired me,) using a combination of Blender and Vroid Studio: (see image below)

Honestly, it's not very good. It's the kind of placeholder art I'd want a real artist to replace at some point, finances permitting. But, it would let me put a face on the cover image, which would attract more eyeballs and maybe more clicks. But it would also be a massive pivot, adding pilots to the game and focusing on them. 

But after reading your advice, I'll consider Plan Waifu a last resort.

You might be right about the itch page being the problem. Right now, I get far fewer plays than I do views, after showing the latest build around on bullet heaven-specific subreddits. I'll give you plan a shot.👍

Thanks again.

 
Why is she dressed like that? Uhhhh... the nebula is a massive distributed supercomputer. It treats passing ships as heat-sinks. No matter how much energy you dump into cooling the cockpit, it stays exactly 80 degrees. Yeah, that works.

This is all great feedback, thank you so much!

I went into this project thinking more about "what can I make" than virality or marketability, so I don't really know what the game's brand is, yet. I'll try to figure it out, going forward.

The web version is strategically under-juiced to try and keep enemy-bullet collision as performant as possible. I did plan on more juice for the PC build. FEEL is an excellent point of reference. Godot has some cool tweening functions built-in, and there's actually a great GDC talk about how to make more: Math for Game Programmers: Fast and Funky 1D Nonlinear Transformations (It should work in pretty much any engine/language, since it's just lerp() + math.)

I guess the biggest surprise was the mouse movement? If you can tell me some good titles that use mouse movement the way that you prefer, that might help with my research.

My design philosophy up until this point was to make all the different control styles games usually have work in tandem with each other. If you let go of the mouse and pick up a controller, it "just works."I hoped this would let me avoid adding too many menu options for controls, but accessibility is important. I'll see what I can do.

Actually, the way the controller currently works, after you aim, if you take your thumb off the stick, the turret "locks" in the last pressed direction, and turns with the ship. Moving the mouse overrides this with mouse-aiming. I suppose I could make the mouse lock the same way. 

The problem is, though, whether you aim backwards for blasting the guys chasing you, forwards to clear a path, or sideways for circle-strafing, usually it's only about 20 seconds, tops, before you need to re-adjust your aim on-the-fly, after the midpoint of a run.

Which, I suppose, isn't an insurmountable problem. It just means I need a dedicated "one-handed mode" with re-tuned game balance.    

And, then, I suppose it's only a matter of time before I'll need to do all the other accessibility options, too. Ah, well. It's a good problem to have. It means people are interested in the game finally. Guess I'll start knocking out the easier ones. 

(Anybody reading this who doesn't know what I'm talking about, check out https://gameaccessibilityguidelines.com/ for a gold mine of player accessibility best-practices for game devs!)

Heh heh!

Fair. 😉

In-game control prompts, coming soon!

This one took me a while to figure out. Then it took me a while to get used to. Then it took me a while to realize that it was actually a roguelite incremental idle game. When I realized that I was gaining xp PER TILE, and that the more xp I earned, the more leftover time points I had per loop, suddenly the whole thing made sense, and I realized how streamlined and efficient the formerly confusing UI was.

I don't have time to play this right now, but I have burned a cyan ant trail into the route from the starting position to the note that tells you to come back in a week.

I'd make a pun about replay value, but I'm tired right now.

Flesh this out. Make it as long as you can. Maybe collaborate with an artist. When the time comes, pay a really good capsule artist to do your steam capsule art for you. I think this has a lot of potential. It'll always be niche? But it's the best kind of niche:  blue ocean!

This one took me a while to figure out. Then it took me a while to get used to. Then it took me a while to realize that it was actually a roguelite incremental idle game. When I realized that I was gaining xp PER TILE, and that the more xp I earned, the more leftover time points I had per loop, suddenly the whole thing made sense, and I realized how streamlined and efficient the formerly confusing UI was.

I don't have time to play this right now, but I have burned a cyan ant trail into the route from the starting position to the note that tells you to come back in a week.

I'd make a pun about replay value, but I'm tired right now.

Flesh this out. Make it as long as you can. Maybe collaborate with an artist. When the time comes, pay a really good capsule artist to do your steam capsule art for you. I think this has a lot of potential. It'll always be niche? But it's the best kind of niche:  blue ocean!

Surprisingly solid tower defense/ platformer hybrid, once you  work out that the towers are stupid and will deliberately try to shoot at things their bullets are too slow to hit, like falling enemies.

Once I realized that, I put "Long" towers on either side of the objective, directly underneath the spots where slimes would fall from the ceiling. Then I started jumping and releasing Long towers to stack them. By the end, I had 6 long towers, 3 covering each drop, firing their bullets straight up into each enemy as they fell. 2 Normal towers on the inside just in case anything slips through, and a third Normal tower I carried around the level with me during the attack wave.

I hated the boss, though. It feels like it belongs in a different game. It uses mechanics the normal game doesn't even have., like Player Health. Don't make me fight a boss. Or let me build towers to fight the boss for me. I didn't come here to do timed jumping puzzles with the keyboard on pangs and penalty of death. 

I came here to defend things with towers.

I couldn't understand what was going on. First fight in my first dungeon:

• I click the white tiles to move my archer away from the slime.
• I click my bow.
• I click the slime. It says 73% chance to hit.
• But then I can't figure out how to actually do the attack.
• Turn times out.
• Slime moves and attacks.
• My turn again. I click the white tiles to move away from the slime.
• I click my bow. Now it says 🔞without the 18. Why? I still have arrows.
• I move one space closer to the slime. Now I'm diagonal from it
• I take damage. Why? Did the slime move?
• I move adjacent to the slime. I click my dagger. Then I click the slime. It actually takes damage! Hooray!
• The slime kills me at the start of the next turn.
• WHY DID THE DAGGER WORK THAT WAY BUT NOT THE BOW!?

In short, it's very unclear what the game wants from me.

What? No, don't write a reply telling me in a reply what I did wrong. Just put that information on the screen in the game! Tell me when that's done.

If the rest of the game isn't about timed jumping puzzles, why does the second room introduce us to timed jumping puzzle red goo? 🤔

Second room killed it for me. The small amount of lag caused by having the game fullscreen made the penultimate jump through the second batch of red stuff onto that little box and then up to where the last two collectibiles are literally impossible to pull off.

I was able to complete the jump after minimizing the game and finishing the level in-browser. But it reminded me why I don't like puzzle-platformers. If a small drop in frame-rate was able to make a jump impossible now, it's only a matter of time before I'm doing some tricky jump later on in some advanced stage, and a lag spike kills me somehow, and I have to go alllll the way back to the start of the puzzle.

It's not your fault. I just don't like this genre.

For some reason, I had trouble playing, and I'm not really sure why. I thought clicking was making the ball go towards my mouse cursor? Then it seemed like maybe it was just reversing direction after every click? Then mouse stopped working altogether for a few seconds, so I switched to arrow keys I think, and was pleasantly surprised to discover it worked.

After that, I just died a couple of times and gave up. (I was playing time Attack.)

I think part of the problem is the timing. Several times, I was waiting for a platform to appear at the bottom which looked like it would help my current situation (basically, I needed a red line right in the middle of the screen, or else I was cooked.) But by the time such a platform appeared, it was too late to move, and I hit the spikes.

Also, it would be nice if Enter did the same thing while navigating the menus as Space. I eventually figured out that I needed to hit space, but my first instinct was to hit enter. If you're not already using enter for something else, just use both!

Interesting take on the bullet heaven genre. The music was cool and the screen effects were kinda fun. It's clear you were going for a chaotic atmosphere. Unfortunately, almost all of the tweaks to the formula made it worse for me. Here's how a typical run went:

• Map starts, there's a gun nearby. But don't pick it up! You'll waste limited ammo.
• Enemy spawns. Now it's safe to pick up the gun. 
• Fire at the giant red cube. (Gas pump?) 
• Bullet goes right through giant red cube without hitting it. Try to aim at its center of mass? the ground beneath its feet? The white dot you can't see half the time? Where's this thing's hitbox!?
• More giant red cubes start to spawn. Eventually, if the horde gets big enough, I'll start hitting some of them, I guess.
• Every few seconds, there's a lag spike. Not sure what's causing it. Maybe it has to load the gun model every time you get a new gun?
• Speaking of which, having to go and get a new gun every 5 seconds is annoying. Half the time, it spawns in the middle of the horde. I can't imagine a 2% chance of getting an SMG instead of a pistol is going to save this mechanic.
• My hands tense up every time I'm forced to go near the edge, every time I'm forced to jump, every time I realize my gun stopped working... pretty much any time anything that makes this game unique happens, my blood pressure goes up.
• Let's talk about jumping, by the way. My back is to the wall. There are enemies all around me. I have a double jump ability. I'm mashing the spacebar. Why my character not go up? That was rhetorical. You're using Unity, so the answer is probably you used a Rigidbody instead of a CharacterController.
• You really need to be more generous with the hitboxes, man. Each enemy should have a hitbox for world collisions that's the same size as the mesh, a seperate hitbox for player bullets that's a bit bigger, and a third hitbox for damaging the player that's a little smaller... oh, wait, you used Rigidbodies for everything, I forgot. Make the player bullet hitboxes bigger, then. No, wait, then they'd hit the world geometry when it doesn't look like they should. Okay, so give the player bullets a larger enemy-collider that fits like a shell around the world-collider. I'll take anything. This business of firing into a crowd and somehow missing half the shots is ridiculous.
• If the bullets moved faster, it would really make it a lot easier to hit what I'm aiming at. I believe Unity has a physics setting to brute-force solve the problem of projectiles "ghosting" through colliders, and if that's too computationally expensive to use, just use box colliders for the bullets, but stretch them along the bullet's trajectory so you're firing long rectangles that get longer the faster the bullet is. 
• (IMPORTANT: change the Box Collider numbers. Do NOT scale the bullet GameObjects! It'll break the physics collision process entirely if any physics objects are scaled to non-uniform proportions!)
• Actually, could ghosting explain why I'm missing all the time? I dunno. The bullets seem pretty slow. It doesn't look like they're moving fast enough for that to be an issue. Then again, at these frame rates, I suppose anything is possible.

I hope you improve the game. You've got a nice theme going. Now you just need to focus on the fundamentals. Your movement, jumping and bullet collision need to be, well, bulletproof. 

Good luck!

Interesting take on the bullet heaven genre. The music was cool and the screen effects were kinda fun. It's clear you were going for a chaotic atmosphere. Unfortunately, almost all of the tweaks to the formula made it worse for me. Here's how a typical run went:

• Map starts, there's a gun nearby. But don't pick it up! You'll waste limited ammo.
• Enemy spawns. Now it's safe to pick up the gun. 
• Fire at the giant red cube. (Gas pump?) 
• Bullet goes right through giant red cube without hitting it. Try to aim at its center of mass? the ground beneath its feet? The white dot you can't see half the time? Where's this thing's hitbox!?
• More giant red cubes start to spawn. Eventually, if the horde gets big enough, I'll start hitting some of them, I guess.
• Every few seconds, there's a lag spike. Not sure what's causing it. Maybe it has to load the gun model every time you get a new gun?
• Speaking of which, having to go and get a new gun every 5 seconds is annoying. Half the time, it spawns in the middle of the horde. I can't imagine a 2% chance of getting an SMG instead of a pistol is going to save this mechanic.
• My hands tense up every time I'm forced to go near the edge, every time I'm forced to jump, every time I realize my gun stopped working... pretty much any time anything that makes this game unique happens, my blood pressure goes up.
• Let's talk about jumping, by the way. My back is to the wall. There are enemies all around me. I have a double jump ability. I'm mashing the spacebar. Why my character not go up? That was rhetorical. You're using Unity, so the answer is probably you used a Rigidbody instead of a CharacterController.
• You really need to be more generous with the hitboxes, man. Each enemy should have a hitbox for world collisions that's the same size as the mesh, a seperate hitbox for player bullets that's a bit bigger, and a third hitbox for damaging the player that's a little smaller... oh, wait, you used Rigidbodies for everything, I forgot. Make the player bullet hitboxes bigger, then. No, wait, then they'd hit the world geometry when it doesn't look like they should. Okay, so give the player bullets a larger enemy-collider that fits like a shell around the world-collider. I'll take anything. This business of firing into a crowd and somehow missing half the shots is ridiculous.
• If the bullets moved faster, it would really make it a lot easier to hit what I'm aiming at. I believe Unity has a physics setting to brute-force solve the problem of projectiles "ghosting" through colliders, and if that's too computationally expensive to use, just use box colliders for the bullets, but stretch them along the bullet's trajectory so you're firing long rectangles that get longer the faster the bullet is. 
• (IMPORTANT: change the Box Collider numbers. Do NOT scale the bullet GameObjects! It'll break the physics collision process entirely if any physics objects are scaled to non-uniform proportions!)
• Actually, could ghosting explain why I'm missing all the time? I dunno. The bullets seem pretty slow. It doesn't look like they're moving fast enough for that to be an issue. Then again, at these frame rates, I suppose anything is possible.

I hope you improve the game. You've got a nice theme going. Now you just need to focus on the fundamentals. Your bullet collision needs to be, well, bulletproof. 

Good luck!

That's fantastic news! :D I look forward to the patch. I'll play the existing build later on Chrome or Edge or something and let you know the difference.

I'll be honest, I hadn't looked up what Phaser and Three.js actually were when I wrote my last comment. I haven't done a lot of web frontend development to be familiar with them. I just assumed they were part of the AI stuff. I suppose if you were desperate, you could try hand-optimizing the html5 output? I have a feeling you'll figure out something more elegant, though. You sound like you know your tools.

Out of curiosity, how long did it take you to get this from concept to where it is right now, using AI?

Physics-based gameplay is almost always a bad idea... but I say that with a caveat. 

Many video games have "physics engines," like Bullet and Havok, for example. And Box3D is apparently poised to optimize that whole concept pretty soon. But historically, what I've seen is a lot of "dev trying to make a simulation, the simulation falls apart when people actually play the game, so they start fudging the numbers." Increasing the mass of cardboard boxes or whatever, until the thing looks like it behaves realistically.

The caveat is, people who grey up playing Beyblade probably know how all those fins and grooves would interact, realistically. Maybe not all of them. But if they see a familiar match-up, they'll have a gut feeling about how it will go down. That could be your game's secret sauce, if done right. That could be its killer app.

Then again, if the player can steer their top into a collision, but they can't keep track of the rotating blades or adjust the tilt of their top, there's no practical way for players to leverage that knowledge. The gameplay becomes vibe checks all the way down. That's the point where it starts making more and more sense to fake it.

But what really gives me pause is the idea of adding all-new parts that never existed or can't exist in the real world. I think you'll find that most physical shapes could have been manufactured out of plastic and chrome in the 1990s if corporations had really wanted to do it. What stopped them from putting a big hammer on one side of the top, or a bunch of forked blades sticking out in all directions? 

Well, physics.

The physical laws that you're trying to capture and bottle also constrained the viability of the actual physical beyblade designs IRL. To put it another way, the more heavily you lean into the arcade gameplay, the less sense the physics simulation is going to make, and the more you'll need to override the physics with pre-programmed or at least heavily constrained responses.

Suppose a top fires a missile at another top. How big are these things? What are they made of? Does the explosion send one of the tops rocketing off-screen in less than 1/60th of a second because it weighs as much as a plastic toy? Or do you increase the top's mass to compensate? Or just use a much weaker explosion? I feel like, at some point, intuitively, they're either going to feel like toys on a toy arena instead of giant steel death machines, or else they're going to feel less like Beyblade for the fans.

There are ways to solve this, but they all involve classic game dev smoke-and-mirrors. Juice, sound effects, screen shake, particles, all that good stuff. They're case-by-case, extremely contextual, and hard to describe. The sorts of things that AI can sometimes do with surprising fidelity... until it suddenly doesn't, and it glitches out in some ridiculous way that a human faking the simulation never would.

It might be that I'm still over-estimating how heavily you rely on AI. Let me know if I'm out of line. I don't feel like most of the code I've written over the last 6 months has been boilerplate. I feel like most of that stuff is already taken care of by the engine, to a very reasonable extent, and most of what's left to the developer is game-specific choices. (Then again, I've been using gdscript as a mostly functional language and only relying on signals to interact with UI elements, so it's possible I've either dodged some godot engine boilerplate, or else created some for myself, depending on how you look at it.)

Here's a random grab-bag of system stats. Let me know if you need anything specific (redacted for relevance):

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Maybe more like 5-10 fps, but in the video I recorded, it drops to 1FPS once three tops start hitting each other. 

It literally looks like the animated gif in the top left corner of this page.😅

It's really interesting that you chose to make your own game engine from scratch. That's literally the hardest thing to do in Game Development, and it usually results in years of wasted effort and developer regrets. One thing you gain from using an established engine like Unity or Unreal or Godot is hardened battle-tested reliability. If someone's using a 4 year old laptop with obscure generic parts from china and out-of-date drivers, that use case has already been encountered hundreds of times by the thousands and thousands of developers using the engine, and is usually long-since patched before you've even picked up the engine.

Now, you can spend hundreds of hours squinting at bad code and pressing the re-roll button until the RNG gods smile upon you and the markov chains manage to guess an answer that looks close enough to what you asked for that AI-bros with high-end systems won't complain too badly about it. Or, you can spend 5 minutes per decision squinting at the engine documentation, make all of the actual decisions yourself, not just the architectural ones, and, most crucially, pivot on a dime when something goes wrong, without completely regenerating everything from scratch and thus losing any institutional knowledge you'd managed to build up about how your own game works.

The downside is that you have to actually think about what to do, and then do it. Every step of the way.

The upside is the 90% of gamers who stay far, far away from anything with the "AI-assisted" tag will not only click on your game, but it might actually just work out-of-the-box on their equally-jank, barely playable devices. When it doesn't, you'll be able to talk to a person in the community or on the engine development team who knows the engine better than you, learn from them, and gradually improve your craft.

I'm sure the sunk cost is probably too great on your end for what I just wrote to change your mind, but I hope you'll think about it for your next project. Whether you were a traditional developer before you picked up AI, or you've been vibe-coding ever since you picked up your first computer, it's worth doing it yourself.

That said, I honestly don't know how I'd go about programming this. Who knows? Maybe this is one of those rare edge-cases where AI is actually the right tool for the job. Maybe there's a big database of Beyblade Math somewhere, and that was the only possible way you could have gotten the arena slope to feel just right to kids who grew up playing BeyBlade, or something. Now, most games fake their physics instead of actually calculating them. But maybe your game uses real physics under-the-hood. Maybe there's a good reason for that. I don't know. If that's the case, I'd love to hear about it. There's a part of me that's rooting for you, even though you're on the other side of the AI debate. I'm not sure why.