Pixel Invaders

Here’s a game I’ve wanted to build for a long time - space invaders but every pixel has physics. I think I first tried to build this about 15 years ago when Box2D.js was just getting started.

It’s kinda fun and a better game designer would probably be able to upgrade it to pretty fun. There are some opportunities for trick shots (having the bullet fall back down on top of an invader for example) or chain reactions and so forth. I also think having upgrades gated behind the height of the dead invader pixel stack could be kind of fun. There’s actually a card-style upgrade system hidden behind a feature flag because I couldn’t really make it particularly fun. Turns out balancing games to be like Balatro takes a lot of effort and I don’t have it in me.

First game built with Claude Opus 4.5 as the main model - the ones prior to this were Sonnet 4 I believe. This is my only real point of comparison - I found Opus 4.5 to be incredibly effective at building these. I had even tried to get Sonnet to build this exact game before and got bogged down in the details. Building this entire game was under 20 human-written prompts and 29% of my 4-hourly usage, compared with at least triple that (and several maxed out usage limits, though it’s not apples to apples as I’m on a max plan now rather than pro) for past games.

Controls

• Arrow keys to move
• Z or spacebar to fire

All these games are incomplete and broken. Caveat emptor