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In this blog post, we’ll take a closer look at the creative process of designing visuals for the Cabbage Planet game’s artwork, the ideas that emerged, and the outcomes blending nostalgia with contemporary design. It was three decades ago that I created a very simple game for fun that featured little space rabbits in jetpacks. I wanted to mark this occasion by creating some artwork, and ideally, to revisit the game and build a new version. I had been using Midjourney for other artwork so naturally I started exploring ideas.
This took me down all sorts of rabbit holes, lol, but the idea formed and in amongst all the material generated from Midjourney I was able to put together my ‘Lunarbunnies and the cabbage planet’ composition. This is minted as an Open Edition on Manifold.
I have included an example of using the Blend option in Midjourney, as I was curious as to how well it could handle the detail in my composition. Initial results were bland, but with some additional prompting such as ‘realistic rabbit heads’ you can see it made a really good effort, although it lacks the little touches you can find in my composition.
I also keep playing around with different ideas for Lunarbunnies, and here’s a few more experiments with Midjourney.
While I was delighted to create my ‘Lunarbunnies and the cabbage planet’ artwork, the one thing I had really wanted to do was revisit my jetpack game. I’ve been learning p5js since 2021 and hoped that at some point I’d feel confident enough to devote some time to building the game. In March 2023 I discovered that chatGPT4 was brilliant at writing code and it knew p5js well. With the Claire Silver AI contest #4 spurring me on, I worked with chatGPT4 to write the code, much faster and more neatly than I could. Midjourney was used for the graphics, with Soundraw.io for music. In this blog post, I’m focusing on the art and graphics. First off, here is a subset of images showing my exploration of background graphics for levels.
Love the results. In the finished game, level one ended up as a mix of two of the results with platforms drawn on top. Level two is almost entirely the raw result. Level three background is the raw result, with the platforms built up from textures found in another result.
For the game characters, the player is based on my original sprites from my simple jetpack game in the ’90s. I used AOZ studio to load up my original AMOS Basic program (recovered from some ancient floppy disks!) and to extract and convert the sprite images. I then made some edits, changing the outfit colour to grey and removing a laser gun, then combined the set into a single sprite sheet png file for use in the game.
For the fauna, or ‘enemies’, I wanted to include the ‘pea UFO’ featured in my artwork which just bounces around the level, and some cabbage eater flying bugs which seek out fully grown cabbages. Cabbages grow and change from green to purple when ready to collect. Midjourney can be asked to generate sprite sheets but generally they aren’t of much use for animation, but still useful for extracting some graphics for working with.
I felt that I needed a ‘boss level’ for a satisfying ending to the game. The game mechanics change from collecting enough cabbages to complete the level to collecting and throwing enough cabbages at the boss to get them to retreat so you can get to your rocket and leave the planet. I’ve added some minimal animation to the boss, with the mouth opening slightly when the projectiles shoot from their mouth, and the eyes closing slightly for when the player successfully hits them with a cabbage projectile.
In conclusion, the journey to recreate my rabbit jetpack game has been a fulfilling and nostalgic experience. By utilizing Midjourney for graphics, ChatGPT-4 for code, and Soundraw.io for music, the project not only rapidily revamped my treasured game but also demonstrated the power of collaboration between human creativity and advanced AI tools. The resulting graphics and game mechanics, including the intricate backgrounds, sprite sheets, and boss level, exemplify the seamless integration of these technologies in bringing a cherished memory to life. This project stands as a testament to the endless possibilities that lie at the intersection of art, technology, and imagination.