Eruption 2: Still Smoldering
Pilot your way out of an erupting volcano while dodging fireballs and rocky pillars. (Built with Codex and GPT 5.5)
Another project with Codex and GPT 5.5 that turned out surprisingly well!
This time, we're piloting a little ship out of an erupting volcano as we dodge fireballs and rocky pillars.
A pattern that has been developing across these projects is that GPT 5.5 has an unexpectedly good sense of vibes. I'm intentionally not being hyper-specific in my prompts, so the AI has a lot of leeway to just ... decide things. In this case it added a simple but appropriate pulsing red glow at the bottom of the screen, chose some nice background colors, and implemented repeating background lines to make movement clear.
It also opted to add a nice little particle effect to the back of the player's ship, which I didn't specifically request.
The original implementation did wind up using asteroids that flew in from the sides of the screen rather than the rock pillars I had hoped for; getting it to switch to pillars was straightforward, though I did have to guide it towards calculating the maximum distance the player could possibly travel given the current speed and ensuring the next gap in the rocks wasn't farther away than that. Without that nudge it happily created impossibly difficult patterns.
The little ship graphic and the fireballs are from a free collection of sprites by Dan Cook that were originally used in the very wonderful vertical shooter Tyrian, which you still can (and should) play.
It figured out how to slice up an image into frames and sorted out when to use the banking versions of the ship sprite more or less on its own, from just a very simple prompt:
Player Sprite Prompt
Let's add another updated image. I've added Ship.png to the assets -- this is a sprite sheet for the player's ship with three frames arranged horizontally. The frames are: Banking left, flying straight, and banking right. Can you add these into the game?
It handled the addition of sound effects almost as well; there was a small hiccup where it was initially re-running the code that fired off the first, short audio clip in response to user interaction over and over again for every user interaction. This led to a weird stuttering sound whenever you did ... anything at all. It did a fine job correcting it though, by both muting the initial sound and skipping over it once audio playback had been started.
A couple of other small highlights:
- GPT had no trouble adding gamepad support, which is relatively under utilized on the web
- It also took the liberty of adding the jagged edges to the rock pillars, which was a pretty nice detail
As usual, you can see the code for Eruption 2 on GitHub. Note that I've omitted the images (since I'm not their owner), and the sounds (since they aren't anything fancy) from the repository.
The logo at the top of the article is once again from GPT Image 2 on Leonardo.ai; it was a fun one to iterate on a bit – the original was just very red:
Overall it did a good job of changing the parts of the image I asked it to without disrupting the rest, including some prompts that referenced specific bits of text in the image (e.g. "Eruption 2" looks great; can you change the "Still Smoldering" text to be more of a standard blocky font with a burning rock style?)
You might wonder why this is called "Eruption 2"; well, it's because long ago in what might as well have been a different timeline, I made a Flash game named "Eruption". It is still more or less playable if you have (or visit a site that uses) some sort of Flash emulator / modern replacement Flash player. Kongregate does this.
