USA-OS
Summer into AI Week 1 Submission
We’re back at it! {Season} into AI, where you stay up way passed your bed time learning things you may or may never use again!
Read about this weeks theme here:
I was thankful to receive some grace on a delayed submission due to…well..summer things!
This 8-bit USA theme really interested me, and I didn’t want to end up on the slacker list just because I was behind. It also gave me a chance to view other’s submissions…whoa! Adam had an extremely cool submission where Paul Revere rides to notify the town’s folk that the British are coming. I enjoyed the attention to detail here with a large variety of sprites that somehow kept hold of a common motif, difficult to do with generated textures as I’ll explain later. Also, Something about 1 or 2 lanterns /shrug
Kady Had a fun submission where you have to calculate the best trajectory to chuck some candy into oncoming recipients. I enjoyed this light hearted game. I felt I couldn’t lose and was just having fun throwing candy at on-comers!
There were so many other noteworthy submissions you can find here. It was really amazing how some contestants were able to produce multiple subs within a week. I’m interested to learn more on their workflows, as I feel they know something I don’t!
USA-OS is my submission. It borrows from the addicting clicker game mechanics where you have two buttons to manage resources and production, buy upgrades to automate your clicking, and keep unwanted values at bay. The idea here is that you’re building the USA starting from Plymouth to present day.
I wanted this to feel like something made by CAPCOM back in the 80s or 90s. The days when engineers spent days writing assembly code just to see the slightest step towards success. I particularly enjoyed Street Fighter II. The sound bites were low enough resolution that you couldn’t quite understand what was being said. The music was on another level. The animations were short and memorable. I tried to bring all of things concepts here into USA-OS.
Play It Here SOUND ON!
The Process:
For now, Codex seems to be my flavor of choice. It does most of the heavy coding, and gives me good prompts to ask GPT for images. This is a manual step, but saves Codex tokens.
The Eagle was an interesting adventure. I asked GPT how to get it to draw consistent sprite sheets. It gave me a prompt that seemed like it’d work really well. It actually rendered something that looked usable, but one of the sprites made no sense. Despite prompting and prompting it to fix it…no avail. I ended up falling back to my Photoshop skills to tweak the sprite sheet and finagle the final sprite in the sheet.
There’s still some differences in the sprites that you can see, but in the game I sped up the animation enough that I couldn’t notice at all. Hmmm.
For the music I relied on Suno, and the SFX I relied on optimizerai until I ran out of tokens and thought…what am I doing? Then I went straight to hugging face and found stable-audio-3-small-sfx which I promptly installed, and one shot the eagle screech sound effect. I took it into Audacity and added reverb. An eagle’s screech always has reverb! It’s the sound of freedom!
Many of the generated sound effects I brought into Audacity and cleaned them up, added fades, normalized their volumes, etc.
One of my favorite parts is the voice over that sounds like a military commander. It sounds so close to what I would expect CAPCOM to put in a Street Fighter game. I’m really happy with the outcome there!
As I wrap up, I had a lot of fun with this one and am looking forward to week 2!
This was pretty awesome, I have had it running for a while trying to make sure I beat Eric’s high score. I love the eagle achievements.