Crystal Caper
0A pixel-art platformer where 100% of the art is AI-generated. Playable in your browser.
Portfolio archive · source and notes preserved
The story
A complete platformer built from a single prompt — "a full game with generated assets" — with every sprite, animation, and tile generated on demand through the PixelLab MCP, none of it hand-drawn or licensed. Pip the fox runs, jumps, and stomps mushrooms across endless procedurally-generated levels cycling through forest, snow, and desert biomes, with a crowned boss, King Grumpcap, capping every 5th level. The whole build chain ran with no human in the loop for the core loop: PixelLab generated the character, enemy, and tileset art from roughly 7 of a 20-generation trial budget, SpriteKit assembled it into a physics-driven platformer with camera follow and parallax, an in-headless autopilot self-test caught a real level bug before a human ever touched a controller, and the same procedural level generator got ported line-for-line to a web build so the HTML5/Canvas version plays identically to the iOS original. Even the boss is a deliberately hand-coded placeholder — kept that way on purpose to conserve the PixelLab generation budget for the assets that mattered more.
Highlights
- ✦100% AI-generated art and animation via the PixelLab MCP — character, enemy, and tileset, none hand-drawn
- ✦Procedurally-generated endless levels across 3 biomes, ported line-for-line from Swift to a matching web build
- ✦Autopilot self-test plays the game headlessly and caught a real level bug pre-launch
- ✦A crowned, armored boss — King Grumpcap — gates every 5th level with a 3-hit telegraph/charge/recover pattern
- ✦Shared online leaderboard on a Cloudflare Worker + KV, verified end-to-end before ever touching a live account
More in Games
Tank Commander
A VR tank game for Meta Quest 3 with a physically-operated cockpit. Made for Ani.
Neon Serpent
A cyberpunk Snake game built by a father-son team — the son is 10 — with a full 3D Vision Pro mode.
BurgerBandit
A fast-food heist game designed by an 8-year-old — the more you steal, the fatter and slower you get.
Want this level of depth on your own project?
The classes teach the same production techniques these repos are built with — scar tissue included.