Something Old. Something New

This is a recap of my talk at the first Impromptu, a creative AI lunch-and-learn I co-host in Belfast.

I’ll own up to something. I co-host an AI event, and I spent most of my slot talking about a processor from 1979 and a games console from the late 1980s.

It did involve AI, I promise.

Pointing AI Backwards

A lot of the energy around AI is pushing forward. New tools, new products, new workflows, new businesses. That’s where I spend my working hours.

But I’m just as interested in the other direction. What happens if you take all this new capability and point it backwards, at old hardware, old formats and old constraints that were never designed with any of it in mind?

The title slide: "Something old" in white and "Something new" in red, around a folded 3D surface made from MegaWord's pixel art.

For me, that meant finally making a game for the Sega Mega Drive, the console that made me want to be a game developer as a kid.

What I Covered

Slimeball Slayer, my first attempt, where I threw free assets at AI and hoped for the best. It was completely the wrong approach.
MegaWord, my Wordle demake, built between March and June and shipped as version 1.0.
Designing for 320 × 224 pixels and a palette of 512 colours, only around 61 of which can be on screen at once.
The background pipeline, and the custom tools I built to stop AI-generated art turning to mud.
An AI that plays the game and reports back on the bugs it finds.
Online leaderboards for an offline console, where the player becomes the network connection.
Respect for the developers who did all of this for a living, with no AI, no SDK and no internet.
The joy of finished things. A cartridge ships, and at some point somebody has to decide it’s done.