Experimental games and technology

Here we will be posting experiments that never turned into successful projects but you might find interesting.

Do you think there is potential in any of these projects? Let us know!

Star Balloon

A tiny match-3 experiment where you steer balloons in real time by controlling fans on both sides of the screen. It's one of our early small games.

Egg Savior

An early real-time puzzle game where you build a path for a chicken to reach its egg. It remains available as a small historical project, but no longer belongs with the studio's adventure-game catalog.

Pixel Art Editor in 1K

A pixel art editor written for the js1k competition in 2019. JS1K is a competition to create a cool JavaScript program using at most 1024 (1k) bytes. This editor includes a color palette, toolbar, fill areas, draw rectangles, infinite undo-redo, mini-preview and keyboard support. All of that in 1024 bytes of code. To put that into perspective, this description already uses over 400 bytes.

Quaderno - Prototyping tool for adventure games

Quaderno is a tool to create adventure games with very little programming. You create your adventures by writing an HTML file where you declare the rooms and interactions, and the quaderno engine does the rest. It's a great companion if you want to test quickly your ideas before spending time coding animations or making complex graphics.

Neural breakout

I thought it would be fun to create a version of the breakout classic using a neural network. Note that the neural network is not playing the game. The neural network _is_ the game (the input to the network are player moves, and the output is the rendered image to put on the screen). In the GIF at the left, at the top you have the game programmed in JS, and at the bottom the game programmed as a neural network, both rendering the same gameplay. If you are into machine learning, the model uses 4 layers of LSTM networks, with 100 cells on each layer.