Upit: Musical game challenge
$5000 in prizes! Try your luck with one of my favorite forward looking gen AI gaming platforms.
One of my favorite entrants in the world of AI-supported game creation is Upit, the newest creation by FRVR, who have made innovative HTML5 games for many years. They always understood the importance of distribution, and understand that AI code generation will make this even more critical. They are running a contest to make a music game, and I thought I would use AI to try my luck.
First I went to Claude to prompt for some ideas. All of its recommendations were quite good, and I picked number 2: "Rhythm Heist." I prompted with the contest rules and this is what it suggested:
1. "Face Conductor" - Musical Chaos Through Facial Control
A FaceKit-powered orchestral chaos game where players use facial expressions and head movements to conduct a virtual orchestra. Raise eyebrows to increase tempo, smile to add brightness/major keys, frown for minor/dramatic sections, and head tilts to balance left/right audio channels. The twist: you're conducting multiple orchestra sections simultaneously while trying to match increasingly complex musical pieces.
2. "Rhythm Heist" - Stealth Action Synced to Beat
A stealth-action game where every movement, jump, and action must be perfectly timed to the beat of dynamically generated music. You play as a master thief infiltrating various locations (nightclub, concert hall, recording studio), and the environment's music changes based on your proximity to guards and objectives. Miss the beat and you make noise, alerting enemies.
3. "Synesthetic City" - Visual Music Exploration
An open-world exploration game where an entire city's architecture, weather, and inhabitants change dynamically based on the music you choose to play. Each district represents a different genre - the Industrial District pulses with electronic beats and neon transforms with the bass, the Classical Quarter has buildings that grow and morph with orchestral swells, and the Jazz Alley features improvisational architecture that shifts unpredictably.
It then generated a lengthy markdown file specifying visuals, mechanics, progression, controls etc. As a checklist/design doc, it looked pretty good.
I copy and pasted this into Upit and it generated 700 lines of code, which unfortunately resulted in a game that instantly ended on launch.
I asked it to fix the code so the game started. Again, no luck.
I prompted it to look at the code and see what’s wrong. This was promising, and it believed the issue is that the position of the player and the guard is such that it instantly triggers the “game over” condition. I ask explicitly for it to fix this.
## Summary **The game ends instantly because the player’s starting position is inside a guard’s vision cone. On the first beat, the detection logic runs and triggers a game over before the player can act.**
--- If you’d like, I can help you analyze the level data and suggest a safe starting position for the player, or help you adjust the guard vision logic so the player isn’t detected on the very first beat!
The next issue is that the controls are touch screen only. I ask it about testing on mobile, and it has a nice publish to web experience that is a little hard to find. Unfortunately, the game does not render at all on mobile web.
I ask it about this and it adjusts some start conditions, but then the game begins to instantly crash on desktop web again. It fixes this by removing a semi-colon, but the instant “game over” condition is back. The game never renders on mobile. I run out of time.
Epilogue
This is a new system and there are still issues to resolve. Upit.com has really fun games, and people with a deeper development background than mine are showing just how good the content can be.
One interesting comparison between Upit and Unity, is that both promise to make game development easier, but Unity focused on many of the upfront barriers — it was easy to get a world up and running, populate it with assets, physics, and have a basic scenario you could start to play around with. With Upit I find myself dealing with basics — why does it not initialize? Why does it instantly end? How do I test it to see if the controls are working? — and not the fun stuff you want (theme, level design, tuning, etc.)
Regardless, I’ll try again and recommend people try the system and enter the competition!