Concept

The concept for this game is based on the movie Fantastic Voyage in which a miniaturized submarine enter a man's body in order to remove an inoperable tumor. In this game, the player must pilot the Proteus in order to oxygenate blood cells. However, a giant white blood cell is alert to your presence and will try to neutralize you. Can you avoid the white corpuscle long enough to turn those blue blood cells red?

Breakdown

First, I created the image assets in Adobe Illustrator, keeping in mind that I wanted the background to scroll infinitely. The game only required 5 assets: background, submarine, white blood cell, blue blood cell, and red blood cell. 

I knew I was going to use Chat GPT to assist me in writing the code for this game, but I had a plan for each bit that I would need. I approached it in a methodical way. I started with the most basic prompt I could make for the game. Then I refined and added bits as I went. I checked that each chunk was working correctly before adding the refinements. Here are the basic elements I added as I went along:

Scrolling art for the background

A player piloted submarine that moved up, down, forward, and backward

Blue blood cells that would turn red when the submarine collided with them

A white blood cell that would always move toward the submarine

A score counter

A win screen

A lose screen

Challenges

The biggest challenge was precision of language with Chat GPT. It would give me code that I would try out, but the code didn't do exactly what I wanted. I would explain this to the AI. Sometimes it would apologize and admit it made a mistake in the coding. It was very polite, so I was polite to it as well. Ultimately I was able to get want I wanted through a long series of refinements and additions to the basic code. I am including a link to the entire chat session for the sake of transparency. 

https://chat.openai.com/share/499ef1fb-9d5e-4e74-b2ee-939493d7991e