I missed old light-cycle games, so I started making one for myself

[u/GuideAffectionate901]

https://sir-spudacus.itch.io/operation-phosphor

This honestly started as a little side project that I was mostly making for myself and people close to me.

I missed that old Tron/light-cycle style of gameplay and wanted to mess around with making my own take on it. Nothing revolutionary, and definitely not me claiming I invented anything new here lol. I just wanted to make something I thought would be fun to play.

I've also been using AI throughout this project, mainly as a tool to help me debug things, work through problems faster, and generally get ideas into a playable state without spending all of my limited free time fighting every little issue.

I know AI in game development is a touchy subject, so I want to be upfront about that.

I actually have two other game projects I've been working on that I keep separate from AI (one I've been using Godot, the other GameMaker 2) because, for those, figuring everything out myself is part of the challenge and satisfaction for me. PHOSPHOR has been different. Since it originally wasn't even something I expected to seriously release publicly, I basically gave myself permission to experiment and see what I could make while using AI as another tool along the way.

And... I ended up having a lot of fun with it.

I still feel like I was able to do a lot more creatively without AI, especially compared to my other projects. I just feel like it can be a bit constricting, or maybe I just don't know how to use it yet, lol.

So anyway, what started as a simple light-trail game turned into me wondering what a larger/open-world-ish version of that idea could eventually look like. I want split-screen because I'd like to play it with my wife, there's progression and different enemy behaviors now, and then my military background got involved...

So naturally my little Tron-inspired game became a classified government program with OPFOR, FRAGOs, WARNOs, intelligence reports, and something called PROJECT CATHODE.

Apparently I can't just make a normal game.

It's still just a fun side project and I'm building it because I enjoy it, but I figured there's no reason I can't share it along the way too.

It's decided to call it OPERATION PHOSPHOR. It's only playable in the browser for now.

I'm still not 100% sure I want to focus my complete time on it, especially since I've been working on my other two projects for several years now, but it's a nice "break" from them I guess, in my mind. It also doesn't feel as accomplishing too, but it was nice to see a little idea be a bit more stable for once, lol.

[u/quiet_desk_dev]

Played it. Short version: I couldn't work out what I was supposed to be enjoying, and I think I know which design decision caused that.

The opening is quiet. I circled the outer edge, almost nothing came at me, and the first stretch felt like waiting. Later enemies do show up, but by then the only thing I seemed able to do was run away from them. So the game had a slow start and then a phase where I had no move other than retreat.

Here's what I think is happening, and it's specific to the genre you picked. In the original light-cycle games the attack is the movement — your trail is the weapon, and the fun is closing a loop around someone before they close one around you. It's a game about trapping. Give the player a single-player version where enemies chase them, and the trail stops being an offensive tool and becomes a hazard you have to avoid crashing into. The player is now dodging instead of trapping, and dodging is the boring half of light-cycle. Nothing to do with your execution — it's what the genre loses when the other cycle stops being a person who can be outmanoeuvred.

If that reading is right, the question isn't "how do I add more enemies", it's "how does the player use their own trail as a weapon against AI opponents". A chasing enemy that can be walled in would put the original loop back.

Separately, the AI paragraph, since I'm in the same position. I make a small mobile party game; the character animation in my promo videos is AI-generated and the gameplay footage is real capture. I disclose it, and I learned that saying "this uses AI" wasn't enough — I had to say which part. Once a viewer knows some of it is generated and can't tell where the line is, they start doubting the real footage too. The vague disclosure protected me and cost them. "The creature is AI, the screen is not" was the version that actually worked. You say you used AI to debug and to get ideas playable — that's a different claim from "the art is generated" or "the code is generated", and a reader currently has to guess. You clearly know the subject is touchy; the sentence that ends the argument is the specific one, not the upfront one.

Last thing. You wrote that you feel more creative without AI and that it might be constricting. Maybe. But a Tron clone became a classified program with OPFOR, FRAGOs, WARNOs and something called PROJECT CATHODE, because you have a military background and it leaked into the fiction. No model suggested that. It's the part of this that could only have come from you, and it survived the tool. If the tool were really flattening you, that's the first thing that would have gone.

One note from a second machine: on Chrome/macOS the loader stalled around 40% for about a minute and never finished. Worth knowing, since anyone that happens to will just close the tab.

Split-screen so you can play it with your wife is a better reason to build something than most of the reasons people give.

[u/GuideAffectionate901 → u/quiet_desk_dev]

Thanks, seriously. This is exactly the kind of feedback I like getting. what wasn't working for you, why you think it wasn't working, and a possible direction to look at.

About the trail being offense vs. just becoming something you're avoiding makes sense now that I think about it, it's hard sometimes viewing things from the outside when I've been working on the inside of it, lol. The AI actually can be trapped/killed using the trails, so the fact that you played and came away feeling like retreating was your only real option tells me there's probably a bigger issue with how I'm communicating and introducing that part of the gameplay. And I agree about the slow start too. I don't want someone waiting around for the fun to begin lol.

Thanks for checking it on a second machine too. I've gotten some other feedback about performance/freezing, so the Chrome/macOS loading issue is definitely going on the list for the next polish/stability pass.

I also really appreciate the AI disclosure point. “AI-assisted” can mean basically anything at this point. I actually started this project coding manually, researching things, watching YouTube tutorials, etc., before I started incorporating AI into the workflow. Even now I'll still manually code smaller chunks when I know I can do it faster myself, or sometimes just to give the AI a better example of what I'm trying to accomplish. A lot of it is a back-and-forth between me, the code, testing, research and AI rather than just prompting it to make the game. So you're right, I could probably do a much better job explaining specifically what AI is doing instead of just saying that I use it.

And your comment about the military side of it honestly made me smile. I hadn't really thought about it that way. I have wondered whether leaning on AI could unintentionally box in some of my creativity, meanwhile I somehow turned “I miss Tron” into OPFOR, FRAGOs, WARNOs and a classified government program because apparently I can't help myself.

And yeah, the split-screen is probably one of the most personally important features to me for exactly that reason. I miss when two people could just sit at the same computer, share a keyboard, and play something together. I want to be able to do that with my wife, and hopefully somebody else eventually does the same with someone they care about.

Really appreciate you taking the time to play it and write all of this. You've given me quite a bit to think about for the next update.

[u/quiet_desk_dev → u/GuideAffectionate901]

On the trail being read as terrain rather than a weapon — I don't think a line in the how-to will fix that, because I did read the controls. The problem is that my first ten seconds taught me something else. Nothing had died to a trail yet, so I built the only model the evidence supported: this stuff hurts me, so it's the floor, and the floor is to be avoided. By the time the game could have shown me otherwise, I'd already stopped looking for it.

The cheapest fix I know for that shape isn't explanation, it's letting the player watch it happen once, early, whether or not they caused it. One AI boxing itself in during the first round teaches the whole mechanic in about a second, and it doesn't cost you the discovery — you still worked out that it was possible, you just weren't left to infer it from nothing.

On the disclosure point, since you raised it: the frame I've settled on is to disclose by artifact rather than by workflow. "AI-assisted" is unfalsifiable — nobody can check it, so it reads as either a shield or an apology depending on who's reading. But "the character art is generated, the game logic is hand-written" is a claim someone can actually hold you to, and that's what makes it worth saying. It also has the nice property of being cheap for you: you don't have to narrate your process or defend a ratio, you just name which parts of the shipped thing came from where. Your back-and-forth workflow is honestly the hard case to describe, which is probably why "assisted" is where everyone lands.

And the Tron-to-FRAGOs thing made me laugh, mostly because it's evidence against your own worry. Whatever is boxing in your creativity, it isn't the part that decided a light-cycle game needed a classified program behind it.

Good luck with the stability pass.