there ARE indeed AI helpers but you must 

- get a crystal

- harvest it pretty quickly

- not all crystals spawn them

and because i submitted at like 8 minutes before i didn't get a chance to give the helpers much of a function if any.

So the frustration of AI development is indeed authentic to the process lol

The challenge round where fly-through is blocked by walls obviously is inspired by Space Duel (Atari)

One thing i may decide to keep

- asteroid impacts INSTANTLY lose a life but down arrow ....IS shield and you could certainly use that. I did and got a lot farther.

As to human creative input, i did -draw- the -first of each class of enemy (small, miniboss, boss, starbase) in MS Paint, then went to OpenArt to build sprite sheets off these class-representatives as uploads. and then i also drew the main ship and the crystals single PNG asset.  And then with like 25 minutes to go I finally had time to cut about 4 of the openArt individual sprite squares out for each enemy class.

I do like that the enemies just multiply its like saying "PLAY...CANFIELD....the Solitaire Game.  then you find out Canfield is impossible beyond the 11th card or something.

And so in that sense it's full-on perfect as an unfriendly late 70's early 80's game intended to gobble quarters in no longer than a minute or two.

the Pac-Man Plus of Asteroids Clones.

A retro game that just HATES the thankless humans (grumpy Clanker...)

I -love- complexity, just go see Faithless or Fickle or Riders of the Nine Planes...

...but there just wasn't time.  Whole thing got like 3 hours max from me.  In the raw Twitter chat.

Best regards.

main website:

https://exedexes1.com/