SWALLET
You are the cave. Cut chambers into a hill, put things in them, and decide what happens to the people who come down looking for whatever they think is in there.
It is an incremental — numbers go up, the board gets bigger, you can leave it running — but the thing you are optimising is a route, and the thing walking that route is somebody else's run.
The two things that fight
A delver who dies leaves remains, and your sinks render remains into spoil and marrow. A delver who gets out alive raises your renown — the only thing that makes the next cohort bigger, and the only thing that brings the richer kinds of delver down at all — and strips your workings on the way through.
Kill everyone and nobody comes. Kill nobody and you render nothing. The answer is a long route that bleeds them slowly and kills most of them deep, beside a sink, while a few crawl back out to tell everyone about it.
The second thing that fights
Every row you cut raises the water table. Under it, wards lose most of their bite and moss drowns — but sinks render half again as fast, and springs only work at all. Sumps and the CHANNEL vein push it back down, and they cost the same spoil as everything else. Going deep is both the goal and the tax.
What is in it
- Twelve fixtures in four families, three levels each — roots, wards, lures, sinks, and drainage. A new one every two rows.
- Four bands of rock, each with a different problem in it: soft wet loam, dry flint-shot chalk, laminated leaking shale, and granite that renders what dies in it twice over.
- Five kinds of delver, from scroungers to adepts, each with their own grit, greed and wit — and each worth a very different amount dead.
- Eight veins of permanent upgrade, bought with marrow. The last one ends the story; the hollow keeps working afterwards.
It never resets
There is no prestige wipe and no death screen. The runs belong to the delvers. Your hollow only ever grows, it saves itself every ten seconds, and the roots keep working while you are away. The worst thing that can happen to you is a delver reaching the heartstone at the bottom — you lose a fifth of your marrow and the deep floods for a minute, and drainage is the answer to that.
Made without any stock art
Every plate, emblem and figure in the game is generated at build time by our own palette-locked pixel engine: five seamless 256×256 material tiles and fifty-six sprites. No asset pack, no diffusion model, nothing bought or downloaded. The music is rendered from an authored score by our own tool and every sound effect is synthesised in your browser as you hear it.
Controls: mouse. M mutes, Escape backs out of a screen.
AI disclosure
Code: yes, AI-written. Graphics: yes — the in-game art is generated by our own pixel engine rather than by a model, but the cover illustration is an image-model render, so this reads yes. Sounds: no — all audio is self-contained procedural synthesis from oscillators, which itch is explicit is not generative AI. Text: yes.
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Development log
Comments
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Oh man that description hurts my brain to read
These AI games feel sloppy and spammy. This looks a lot like the fungus game and also doesn't quite work or feel right either. If you use AI at least use it creatively to create something interesting that would be out of reach otherwise.
That's very good constructive criticism I have two projects mid-build right now that I'm going to finish but I've put a full stop on my game production. I'm doing a full top to bottom red team audit on everything right now and I'm going to be launching a couple of much higher end jrpg style flagship games over the next few days. I've also manually gone through and written out full instructions and code bases manually for 30 new games that I have fully researched that hopefully don't feel anything like what I have built in the past here's a preview of what I'm going to be building next I hope you stay with me and give me a little time because it'll take a little while to get everything together for this but here are my plans over the next few weeks for free and paid games
Laternbound will be a SNES style jrpg flagship launching over the next week.
Subverted RPGs & Progression Systems
Systemic Puzzles & "Metroidbrainia"
Action, Rhythm & Bullet-Hell Hybrids
Simulation, Management & Incremental
Narrative, UI-Driven & Unique Hooks
even the response feels like AI
Sigh. It wasnt..
Some of these games are at least briefly kind of fun. But maybe you could make them slightly less incoherent, in that "My AI Writes Like The World's Worst Poet!" kind of way, if you included some instructions such as:
"Write in fluent, ordinary English. Express ideas in a straightforward, ordinary way. Do not attempt to be clever; you will fail. Express, clearly, what specifically the player should do, or what a thing is, what it does, what the player does with it, etc. Do not add unnecessary 'flavor' text in contexts where it may be difficult for a player to distinguish that text from actual meaningful information."
Or something like that. I mean, that's supposed to be your job. I don't care if you have AI write the code, or do the art, or even write the text - but at least do some minimal quality control, and address egregious errors. And yeah, obnoxiously incoherent text is an error, both in-game, and in the description.
Such as... don't say "It is an incremental — numbers go up, the board gets bigger, you can leave it running — but the thing you are optimising is a route, and the thing walking that route is somebody else's run."
Because... what are 'you' talking about here? I assume it means something like "you dig a cool path/maze for the little adventurer NPC dudes." Describing this as somehow involving "somebody else's run" is cringy, and bizarre, and it's also essentially a lie because a straightforward interpretation of this would suggest that it means other player's actions have some kind of influence. As in, this is some kind of multiplayer environment, and other players are playing as the adventure guys, or something.
See, this kind of thing is why people get angry about "AI slop." Mostly not because of principle - but because so many devs just 'slop' out whatever junk the AI coder gives them without trying to fix problems, and without even trying to prompt it well. It makes us think you're just loading up Claude Code or whatever and saying "Make me up a quick junk html game, don't use too many tokens" and that's it.