As an exercise in learning how to write code in AI, I've been doing a few hours of tinkering around with building a very rudimentary shmup in Pico8 using Codex. This is far from anything finished (or even particularly good) but some basic stuff should be there. If you want to tinker with parameters, most things should be configurable in the code. I'm calling this Vibe Exploder, and I have no idea how much effort I'm going to put into it, but thought it might be interesting to see what you can do with a model. Feedback would be appreciated.
Updated with a new version (same link): This adds a few more bullet patterns (which can be toggled by using the B button.) Right now I'm mostly tinkering with creating different types of bullet patterns in this one; My next step once I have a few of these in place is to try to create a better structure for defining them in a reusable class which can be applied to enemy objects. I still expect this to be pretty terrible for a while, but I do think I can at least get something decent out of it over time...
Still nowhere near anything coherent, but there's plenty of bullets to go around. As always, feedback would be welcome. I can also provide a Github link (may not be fully up to date) on request.
The biggest change in this one is sprite rotation. Still figuring out the best way to build this out, but from here the next steps will likely be focusing more on building out more sprites and trying to make this more game like.
