Nitro Lancer

Drive around in an RC Pro-Am truck, using your lance to smash up targets.

The game wants you to build up a streak big enough to win.

But I just want to hold down space and Nitro forever.


My 3yo claims the targets are ducks; wish I'd thought of that and leaned into it.

AI disclosure: I used Claude Code for writing the code; I did not use image or sound generators.

The sounds are totally human-created. The art is physical art that I did which was chopped up in various ways by the code. More detail on that below.

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PROCESS NOTES

I spent much of my time over the weekend creating various real-world objects as the basis for the art, and doing foley sounds. I also tried to get a guitar song in there but failed and had to scrap it.

Here's a collage of a few parts of the human art process:


On the AI side, I directed it at SpriteStack2D
and started with a few vibe-coded throaway prototypes about art style and gamefeel.

Here's the agent's first art test for the truck:


and here is the initial gameplay prototype:


There was a lot of very detail-oriented back-and-forth with the coding agent, but I was not writing the code by hand this time.

It built an art pipeline, which took my hand-created art through tooling, chopping them up into individual pieces for use in-game.

The ground is several different things, a mix of watercolor paintings and construction paper, then merged with soft-edged perlin-noise blobs. The impact popup-FX and nitro flame-burst are cut out of construction paper. The smoke is steel wool. The lance is a photo of a paintbrush merged with a photo of some scissors. The dirt chunks that fly out when you drive through the dirt are speckles lifted from a watercolor "wash" smeared with clingwrap to create odd shapes. And so on.