Vibeoverflow

boddiul 2026-10-19 23:32 ♥ 0

I really wanted to include a "NO AI was used in the development at all" notice, but in the final hour before the deadline, things didn't go quite as planned... I’m planning to write a blog post about it.

** UPD: **

** I wrote a postmortem about the development of this game: https://ldjam.com/events/ludum-dare/60/vibeoverflow/70-hours-without-ai-and-what-went-wrong **

TL;DR: I tried to avoid using AI for the first 70 hours of development and wrote the parser, code editor, and mini-engine myself, as well as creating the graphics and music. In the last 2 hours, I had to resort to AI to finish the forum and comment system. In the article, I talk about how I feel about all of this.

Btw, yes, the programming language here is very limited. There are no loops, no expressions, and no function calls inside function arguments. Nevertheless, it should be Turing-complete, so I'm curious to see what crazy workarounds people might come up with using the syntax that's available :)

isaac-hisey 2026-10-20 06:17 ♥ 0

Not bad, I got over clever and I guess the interpreter didn't like me not following it stricter version of python lol. I beat it legitimately and few way illegitimately. Fun idea.

vinnnie 2026-10-20 09:53 ♥ 0

Really fun game. Can mess about a lot with it, getting enemies to heal you. Setting the speed so high you break out of the dungeon and can see the code editor.

Very smart idea, nice of you to put the stack overflow in for people that might just be artists / sound designers / tired after programming for 72 hours!

fedor-perfilov 2026-10-20 13:30 ♥ 0

A game about a developer who fixes their own game by playing it. Now that’s something new.

jiri-hysek 2026-10-20 18:12 ♥ 0

I love the idea! It's so fun when i can change rules of the game I'm playing. I immediately updated enemies to explode when they see me, fixed wall breaking and for finishing the game I had to check the "stack overflow", which helped! Exactly like normal life 5 years ago. That was fun! Thanks a lot! Oh and that you wrote the whole interpreter, that was super cool! (Btw. I wrote one in my game too, but simpler:)

smerdyaisaurus 2026-10-21 10:07 ♥ 0

liked the idea, can't say that about execution, for me game was pretty laggy, it crashed few times and code lines were duplicated

baziki 2026-10-27 21:44 ♥ 0

The ending message went away too quickly for me to get a screenshot, so take this as completion proof instead lol:

Screenshot 2026-10-27 173959.png

This is one of the most innovative entries I've seen, as well as my favorite use of the theme. I only realized you had actually implemented a functioning language when I accidentally typed `if other.type == player:` in `BULLET_PLAYER` and started hitting myself with my own bullets, lol. I'm really curious to see how game breaking this can get, but I stayed clean for my first playthrough. And again, really clever use of theme... Stack Overflow is certainly "old tech" at this point.

I think that the gameplay is good, but it's hard for me to give neutral feedback. Personally, I had some fun finding the bugs without posting to Stack Overflow (once I realized that was allowed). But for non-programmers, I'm not sure the loop of experiencing bugs, posting to stack overflow, and following the instructions would have been as good of a time. Granted, this is clearly a game directed at people with at least some programming knowledge, so maybe that's not a big deal? In any case, I had a lot of fun, and now I want to play through again to see what kind of game-breaking shenanigans are possible. Great entry :)

rend 2026-10-27 21:57 ♥ 0

What a twist! I love what you did, it's clever, easy to understand, rewarding. Maybe a bit loose on the theme connection but a real gem, bravo!

onedozenbagels 2026-10-28 01:34 ♥ 1

Very clever and enjoyable take on "old tech". My only complaint is that it was so full of bugs. ;P