michaelteter

I never saw Roc before, but at first glance I love it: functional compiled language with good performance and Ruby ergonomics.

Yes, you're right - I need to improve the whole ground experience. The plane does gradually use fuel, but you're vastly more likely to crash before you run out of fuel.

Landing and pausing on the runway refuels the plane, but the control behavior on the ground sucks.

The goal was to make a game similar in look and feel to an old console game I played when I was a kid.

Just like with many arcade racing games, the physics are not intended to be hyper-realistic.

I do love realistic physics in flight/driving sims, but that just wasn't my goal here.

Labels rarely fit well. We can't even agree on the definition of "art".

I would prefer to say "fascination", because for some people, writing code is their fascination. Is it art if only they would label it so? Because I'm pretty sure that if a "code artist" showed their code to 10 other experienced developers, not only would some of the others not consider it art, but likely some of the others would consider it low quality.

Are code golfers artists? Fetishists? What if they believe theirs is the only way - the true artistry of coding? Would all of our single-responsibility, immutable core/imperative shell hybrid-functional code be discounted as garbage? (Not poking at the code golfers; I think they do it for the challenge, not because they believe that is how code should be written; but it illustrates an extreme.)

For most people, I think it's fair to say they write code because they are trying to make something happen. If their code runs without errors, in the necessary time, and without exhausting the computer's memory, then I believe most would consider that code "good": it does the job.

Are they working with others? Will others need to read it? If so, perhaps the most artistic code is not the best code to write. I know many professionals dislike working with the code artist who makes code that is unreadable to all but the most skilled developers, because it causes friction and leads to misunderstandings and bugs.

Now we have reached the point where general purpose code is so easily and correctly built by our AI tools that there is no practical point to writing it ourselves.

Are the AI-naysayers, the purists, writing their own libraries? Are they building everything from scratch? If not, they are not the true code artists. They have made practical concessions. They just haven't graduated to the realization that code is a commodity.

I suspect the people most against use of AI for building are the people who lack the creativity - the idea sources - and live just to translate requirements into code. They will gradually find fewer opportunities, and this threat is what probably makes them get emotional when looking at AI-built products.

Many games are better.

Many comments are better too :).

It now exists. It did not exist before I “made” it.

For me it has value, because it is something I wanted to play.

I am the author.

Is code the art? Or is the product of that code, and the way people feel when they use that product the point?

At this point, after enjoying the craft of writing code for decades, I now just want to build things I like. At this point I care zero about the details of the code as long as the product meets my requirements.

Until you try building a complete (if simple) product, you may not realize how many decisions are involved which have nothing to do with code but are critical to the success of the product. That is my focus.

I guess the 6 hours of intentional dozens of interactions I had with Gemini could be considered slop to some. But I created this to scratch an itch of an old game I enjoyed in the past. And I enjoy playing this one.

After 30 years of hand-crafting code in 8 languages, I think I can be excused from having to do the tedious work of translating ideas into executable code.

You would see about 50 conversations.

Contrary to what some negative comments suggest, this was not a simple one prompt game. I made a lot of choices and gave a lot of direction to Gemini.

If I get motivated enough I might try to make a meta doc describing the actual process with key summaries of different types of conversations.

It basically does this. If you are in level flight or a dive, you increase speed up to a certain max (level flight max is less than dive max). If you climb, you bleed off speed. To reach high balloons, you often need to build up more speed before you can climb high enough.

There's probably room for improvement, but it's already enough fun that I can play it for several minutes at a time.

Now I'm trying to decide if there's anything else of value to add - without making it too much of anything. I think I'm about finished now.

I have had such good, consistent success with Gemini 3.6 Flash (usually on medium setting) that I forget about it. It is just this reliable, effective assistant that I use for managing and organizing information, brainstorming, and of course coding.

I honestly don't know what I would want more/better than what I was already getting... so I'm curious if I will see any improvements with 3.7.