Show HN: Super Dario

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tthepasch about 5 hours ago 96 commentsRead Article on superdario.pawb.de

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Discussion Sentiment

80% Positive

Analyzed from 1533 words in the discussion.

Discussion (96 Comments)Read Original on HackerNews

mrkeen•about 4 hours ago

This game was so good, it's as if the developer was given a team of PhD-level experts to work on it.

Waterluvian•about 3 hours ago

Haters will suggest AI built this, but I can personally tell there’s at least a kilomolyneux (approx. 55 centikojimas) of PhD-level game dev expertise involved.

goldenarm•about 4 hours ago

Funny idea but wow the gameplay is terrible and full of bugs. Bad hitboxes, shells that bounce in front of holes, bad physics.

AI still cannot oneshot 2D platformers, the most documented videogame genre with so much source code available.

dvt•about 4 hours ago

One-shotting is a bit of a red herring, imo. Let's say I wanted to build a "Super Dario" meme platformer. I would do some research, find a platformer on Codepen or Github that "feels" good, tweak it to my liking, change the sprites, and voila.

I constantly have to tell agents to just "look it up online" and "don't hallucinate your own components" because people have already done this a million times. Ironically, being more lazy could make these models more useful.

bogwog•about 3 hours ago

So you're saying that it's not fair to rate a coding model on its ability to code, and instead the best way to use it is to tell it to find existing human-written code online rather than generate actual code on its own?

dvt•about 2 hours ago

If you're testing how good LLMs are at compressing information, then I think that's a fair test. Personally, I don't really think that's where their strength comes from (especially considering how much more useful local models that are orders of magnitude smaller than Claude/OpenAI-tier models have gotten). In other words, we already have a "super-intelligence"—it's called the internet, so just use the darn thing.

tripleee•about 1 hour ago

It's not a bad idea, to be honest.

Thinking about it now you could probably get even better quality if you pre-write the code yourself and hand it to the LLM. That way it outputs exactly what you want.

darkwater•about 3 hours ago

Isn't part of the human coding that Super Dario tells us LLM are going to replace also made of what you are saying GP is saying?

sefrost•about 3 hours ago

Yes for any slightly non-standard web UI components I either tell the LLM to search the web and find examples or I provide them myself.

Usually the ones I provide myself are better than the ones they find themselves.

I'm not super clear how they search the web or what they do and don't have access to. It seems to be quite fast.

jimkleiber•about 3 hours ago

TBH, I wonder how much one-shotting posts are just lying about one-shotting it.

uncivilized•about 2 hours ago

Many for sure.

input_sh•about 4 hours ago

On the "bright side", it's impossible to die!

miyoji•about 4 hours ago

This was my favorite bit of meta-commentary: it doesn't matter how poorly you play, you never lose!

kridsdale1•about 3 hours ago

Even survived the Hegseth Bullet Bill attack

disillusioned•about 4 hours ago

That's the power of venture capital!

zahlman•about 2 hours ago

It seems that you do lose a life when hit by an enemy or falling in a pit, but the latter freezes until you click the toggle sound button, and running out of lives resets the counter to 3 and halves your "valuation".

thisisit•about 4 hours ago

More like keeps "extending by 1 more week"

mkagenius•about 3 hours ago

you mean amodei

micromacrofoot•about 3 hours ago

I think that supports the premise more than it defies it

boutell•about 3 hours ago

Strong agree. Very much part of the joke.

vunderba•about 4 hours ago

Yep. Additionally having experimented pretty heavily in this space, I'll state that even with state-of-the-art models (like NB Pro or GPT-Image-2), good luck getting them to generate sprite sheets with consistent frames for animation particularly if you're shooting for a pixel art aesthetic.

I've made a few sprite-based animations with AI assistance but it still required a fair amount of manual photoshop (or in my case Aseprite) post-processing.

nananana9•about 3 hours ago

If you're not going for pixel art, use the video to video models (the character swap ones that take in a video reference of the animation and a still of the character (the tiktok deepfake models)).

You can e.g. download a run cycle from Mixamo, use Blender to render a video from whatever angle you wish, and feed that into the model along with your sprite on a green background, it's pretty much perfect.

vunderba•about 1 hour ago

Thanks for the info! I'll give this a shot. Most of my knowledge is from over a year ago, when I would set up OpenPose-style positioning with a controlnet at a high strength to guide an image-to-image workflow in comfyui. But it was pretty tedious and prone to errors.

throwthrowuknow•about 3 hours ago

It’s a tough problem but Retro Diffusion is making some incredible progress

https://retrodiffusion.ai/

vunderba•about 1 hour ago

Nice. I need to go check them out again. I really liked their original Retro Diffusion models but this a while back in the SDXL days. It felt like it was trained on more natural language, so prompting it was quite nice for that era.

But if they’ve been working on it specifically for animation, that’s pretty neat.

slopinthebag•about 4 hours ago

Not to mention it feels like 30hz on my 120hz monitor. It's actually impressive how it managed to mess that up.

But yeah guys, AI sure will be writing all the code just give it another 6 months...

tavavex•about 4 hours ago

It feels like each new SOTA model brings the average quality a bit closer to the asymptote of well-made non-vibecoded software but it can't quite cross it.

uncivilized•about 2 hours ago

I don’t know if it’s showcasing that AI is still that bad, or if it’s purposely built to be this bad in a funny type of way.

nsxwolf•about 4 hours ago

Just amazing how right a few people at Nintendo got this in 1985, and its still so easy to get it absolutely wrong.

reactordev•about 4 hours ago

Nintendo wasn’t even trying, it was all their old sprite characters from Japan market that didn’t do well smashed together in a rushed title for an NA launch. It surprised them.

nsxwolf•about 3 hours ago

Shigeru Miyamoto has spoken many times about the process of perfecting the controls for SMB, which is quite the opposite of "wasn't even trying".

Wowfunhappy•about 4 hours ago

Huh? This is very much not my understanding of SMB1’s development. Are you maybe thinking of Donkey Kong (made to replace a failed arcade game) and/or the US version of SMB2 (a re-skinned non-Mario Japanese game)?

reactordev•about 4 hours ago

You’re absolutely right! /s

jake_and_fatman•about 5 hours ago

Absolute fire. Love how Deepseek tortoise shell can only be slowed, not killed.

boutell•about 3 hours ago

Thank you, I missed that.

Pxtl•about 2 hours ago

You can bounce on them forever for infinite coins. But the coins don't matter. Nothing matters.

andrew_ocs•about 5 hours ago

I think you should try submitting it to anthropic community :)

https://claude.com/community#:~:text=What,Claude%3F

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

I'll... uh, do it next week!

aliasxneo•about 3 hours ago

Wow, my entire feelings on this series of events summed up in a single game. Extra rich its vibe coded. We need more of this.

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

Okay, so, maker here!

I was expecting this to drown in the flood of /newest, so seeing so many folks get a chuckle out of this is a very pleasant surprise. The obvious spark for this was yesterday's second last-minute extension of the Fable promotional window (a phrase comprised of two heavily strained words at this point), and an hour or so of back-and-forth with GLM-5.2 and Opus later, here we are.

The game is, of course, unwinnable on purpose. There is no ending. The flag always escapes, the date always extends, and new GPT releases will continue to wipe your valuation no matter how many coins or funding round power-ups you collect. The win condition is closing the tab because you're tired of it, which I'd argue makes it the most realistic AI-industry simulation currently available on the internet.

The code is, of course, vibe-slopped, most of the imagery is original human-slop (or sourced from icon libraries). Happy to answer any and all questions and take any and all flak. The bugs are a part of the joke, I swear!

solaire_oa•19 minutes ago

I'd be interested in seeing your prompts, out of curiosity.

Either way I had a good laugh when I realized it wasn't going to end and getting the coins/tokens was pointless.

frankdenbow•about 3 hours ago

well done, got a good laugh out of this one.

kylehotchkiss•about 4 hours ago

Level 10 government subsidy invincible mode

thepasch•about 3 hours ago

gotta save some ideas for the sequel

humam_alhusaini•about 4 hours ago

This is great lol

Can you release a version playable on mobile?

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

Yeah, on it right now! Should be up within the hour.

edit: It's up!

neural_thing•about 3 hours ago

If you like tech-themed games, I made Good Til Canceled for GTC - check it out - https://goodtilcanceled.com/

ryandrake•about 3 hours ago

Desktop Safari 18.6 / Mac: Nice, but none of the text on the signs are readable. Just appears as unreadable dots. Also the music doesn't work on Safari.

Firefox works great!

thepasch•about 3 hours ago

Agh, sorry about that. I had no Mac around to test this on, though I might be able to get one by proxy. I'll try to get it fixed.

kridsdale1•about 3 hours ago

Same bug in iOS 27 chrome.

nico•about 2 hours ago

Omg, so funny! I can’t believe I played this for like 5 min straight

Are those little Sam Altmans?!

Love the power ups: tokenmaxxing, usage reset

sajithdilshan•about 4 hours ago

The game is really cool, but I'm a bit dissapoint by the music. I want the original them song. Also the fact that the game is never ending bothers my OCD

m_w_•about 5 hours ago

+1 for the claude icon fire bars

danielrmay•about 3 hours ago

For all of the advertising of GPT 5.6 in this charming little game, the chatgpt.com UI has failed to load in the past several hours for me

kaeruct•about 4 hours ago

Why do the coins spin faster when I move?

kridsdale1•about 3 hours ago

Momentum. And / or Special Relativity.

GaggiX•about 5 hours ago

Someone didn't know how to use the remaining credits.

thepasch•about 5 hours ago

The heavy lifting was done by Opus. I wouldn't burn precious soon-to-be-departing Fable usage on this!

andrew_ocs•about 4 hours ago

I wouldnt be so sure Fable wouldnt just refuse to do this

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

I mean, technically, "I selected Fable for this task" and "Opus did the heavy lifting" aren't mutually exclusive statements...?

meken•about 3 hours ago

The music reminds me of Mappy Land (one of my favorite childhood games).

thepasch•about 3 hours ago

No credit to me for that! Got it off of here: https://opengameart.org/content/bonus-round-8bit

forestingfisher•about 5 hours ago

Can’t believe this doesn’t already exist.

seydor•about 5 hours ago

The game must be banned for 6 months

clutter55561•about 3 hours ago

This wins the internet this week!

salahadawi•about 4 hours ago

  New Gemini model! Nobody cares.

With the Gemini power-up falling off the screen got a chuckle out of me

mchusma•about 4 hours ago

This was my favorite as well.

CrzyLngPwd•about 3 hours ago

I wonder which model built it :-)

helloplanets•about 5 hours ago

Shouldn't the valuation be in Bs instead of Ms?

jagged-chisel•about 5 hours ago

Numbers look bigger when multiplied by one thousand

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

Grab that coin and you'll get there!

geoffbp•about 3 hours ago

Open source it? :-)

thatxliner•about 5 hours ago

a perfect representation of the situation

slicendice•about 3 hours ago

Absolutely hilarious

pixelpanic•about 5 hours ago

this guy fits better, I guess: https://helios-i.mashable.com/imagery/videos/04iSw6696vB87oa...

jdw64•about 3 hours ago

After playing this game, I think it's time to launch 'vibe game design.' Now that the code is solved, it's time to release 'vibe game design,' 'vibe music design,' and 'vibe control design' for serious game design

Cider9986•about 4 hours ago

No mobile support.

thepasch•about 4 hours ago

On-screen controls are live!

m132•about 1 hour ago

Now all that's missing is being able to move and jump at once

parl_match•about 4 hours ago

Thanks for your contribution.

sherlock-holmes•about 4 hours ago

incredible

einpoklum•about 5 hours ago

This reminded me of how much I suck at side-scroller arcade games. I keep missing those coins and falling off ledges... :-(

Good thing I have a day job. Where I don't use AI.

starik36•about 5 hours ago

Nice and clever!

_s_a_m_•about 3 hours ago

hahaahhahahahahahahahahahah

dancemethis•about 4 hours ago

I mean, Sam should be more of a ghoul with those creepy sunken eyes. And Dario that guy with hair on the sides.

dude250711•about 4 hours ago

Like political satire, only in IT.

dhg72•about 5 hours ago

There are plenty of critiques of the AI labs but it's a bit ironic leveling criticism in a game which was obviously one-shotted by their models and which would never have been made without AI

ipsum2•about 5 hours ago

That's part of the joke.

gordon_freeman•about 5 hours ago

who needs this AI-genrated game for real though? Would not I rather play the real Mario instead? this is clearly part of the joke!

androiddrew•about 5 hours ago

A model harness can launch a bagillion sub agents and we still call it one shotting.

zahlman•about 2 hours ago

... And why shouldn't we? The system still responded to a single prompt, and we still took its first submitted candidate.

croes•about 4 hours ago

Fighting them with their own weapons isn’t ironic it’s poetic justice