Galaxa - Building a BBC Micro game with AI

Paul Newell recalls creating a BBC Micro game called Caterpillar in 1983, which was published in Computer and Video Games magazine. In 2023, while recovering from an illness, Newell decided to rewrite the game using 6502 assembler. The rewritten version, named Galaxa, was intended to be a clone of the popular Galaxian game.

Newell attempted to utilize AI tools, specifically Claude and Opus 5.5, to assist in the development process. Although the AI code was initially poor, Newell managed to refine it over several weeks. He also drew upon his own accumulated knowledge to push the project forward.

Despite the advances in AI since February, Newell aimed to create a Galaxian clone for the BBC Micro due to his long-standing interest in the game. He set out to achieve this goal on a wet Saturday morning, with the end result being Galaxa.

To accomplish this task, Newell relied solely on Opus 5.5, as the cost of writing the 100% code had significantly reduced. However, memory constraints (limited to ~8k) necessitated trimming back on certain features during the design phase. Newell was impressed by the significant improvement in AI capabilities over such a short period of time, resulting in a game that closely matches the hardware's capabilities.

Galaxa is available to play at https://newell-paul.github.io/galaxa-6502/ and its source code is hosted on GitHub at https://github.com/newell-paul/galaxa-6502. Newell himself achieved a high score of 20550 in the game.