How it was made: The game's itch.io page discloses AI use for code, sounds and text, and VS Games' October 30 devlog says generative AI was used for the code, sound, music and text. The graphics are not AI-made; they come from ansimuz's Tiny RPG asset packs. According to the devlog, the cartridge is written in C with 65816 assembly, and balance is tuned by scripted bots that play the real game from the title screen, one button press at a time. "Every balance number we use comes from a bot pressing buttons in the real game," VS Games wrote.
Across 24 seeds per bot on the full five-act campaign, a "planner" bot that drafts and shops on purpose finished every run, a bot that reads the enemy's intent finished 83%, and a bot that only blocks finished none. The bots also showed that the Warden starting deck struggled to finish fights at all, so the developer swapped one of its two healing cards for a third Strike.
The developer's full cartridge is 4 MB, with five acts and five starting decks. The jam caps entries at 512 KB, so the competition build keeps only Act 1 and the Wanderer deck, and compresses its graphics from 1.95 MB to 253 KB, according to the devlog. Jam submissions closed on October 31, and voting is under way. VS Games also makes SNES Studio, a browser app for building Super Nintendo games without code or in a subset of TypeScript.
