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!

Pop the bricks

Pop as many green bricks as possible. You pop them by clicking/tapping on them. If you tap a red brick, it will freeze. If a green brick reaches the top of the screen, or another frozen brick, it will also freeze. These bricks keep moving faster and faster. You have to be quick before the screen fills with frozen bricks.

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.

MyBot - Chatbot authoring tool

A visual tool to create chatbots without writing any code, or constructing complex rules. You just need to provide a list of questions and possible answers, and the system will use machine learning to figure out how to learn from it. Although not strictly related to video games, this project started as a way to create conversational bots for adventure games.