Explosive Ordnance

One man. One grenade launcher. Unlimited ammo. No plan.

Dr. Overkill has an island, a private army, and a doomsday weapon on a countdown. Brock Danger has an M79 and the firm conviction that every problem is a positioning problem for an explosion.

EXPLOSIVE ORDNANCE is an old-school belt-scrolling beat 'em up in which you never throw a punch. You lob grenades into crowds and watch bodies cartwheel into the air. The entire game is built around making that one moment feel enormous — guards launch, tumble, and land badly; barricades come apart into spinning debris; the screen kicks; the light goes white. Then you reload, which takes just long enough to matter.

Four beats: storm the beach, take the villa compound, breach the command center, and shut down the doomsday weapon — then deal with the Doctor personally. His armour eats explosions. You'll have to be more imaginative than that.

Enemy fire is slow and telegraphed on purpose. Watch for the sight line, then step out of the lane — or get blown clean over it. Being airborne is a dodge.

### Controls

- WASD / Arrows — move

- Mouse — aim · Left click — fire

- R — restart · Hold SHIFT — slow motion

- L — lighting · M — mute

Built for the AI Browser Game Jam 4 — theme: "CHARGE!"

Read as explosive charge, and taken as literally as we could manage.

### How this was made

Built with Claude Code (Claude Opus) as the development partner — architecture, gameplay code, the procedural texture generator, and the sound synthesis script were all AI-written, with direction, design decisions and playtesting from me. Claude was the one who spotted the explosive charge interpretation of the theme and from that I came up with the concept for an over the top explosive themed shooter. Claude was able to quickly iterate on the design idea and provide prototypes for top down and side on versions of the idea. We settled on the beat 'em up style after finding both prototypes didn't feel great. The boss fight in particular came out of a back-and-forth with Claude. Claude came up with several options for the boss fight but after it was prototyped I didn't like the feel any of them. I eventually came up with the idea of Dr. Overkill being immune to blast damage but still thrown by it, so you kill him by launching him into the arena's live coils. Claude implemented and tuned it and turned it from a poorly defined idea into a working boss fight.

Originally we used fully procedural art for the characters too, but Claude was able to get itself talking to gamelabstudio.co and drive that to generate art for the player, the enemies, the boss, and the props and weapons. Dr. Overkill was generated by feeding the title card back in as a reference image, so the boss you fight is the same character from the key art rather than a second interpretation of the same description. It made the game look much better, but it also needed a lot of hand tweaking to get all the separate images to fit together with the 2D bone animation we already had.

All the sound and the whole world are generated from code — every backdrop layer, explosion, spark and shockwave is drawn at runtime from raw pixels, and all the sound effects are synthesized from scratch by a Python script. The characters and props are AI-generated art, cut into per-part sprites and hung on a hand-written skeleton, so Brock still tumbles as one piece when his own grenade launches him.

Art generated with gamelabstudio.co — key art, cover, characters and props.

### Credits

- **Engine:** libGDX, Box2D, box2dlights — project generated with gdx-liftoff (and then fixed by Claude)

- **Font:** Noto Sans, SIL Open Font License 1.1 (full licence ships with the game)

- **AI tooling:** Claude Code / Claude Opus

- **Art generation:** gamelabstudio.co — cover, title card, characters and props

- Everything else was made during the jam

Plays in the browser, but can also be downloaded for Windows or Linux.