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How two brothers built a game in 50 days using Amazon Q while running a pizzeria 🍕

How two brothers built a game in 50 days using Amazon Q while running a pizzeria 🍕

Blitzer is a video game featuring unlimited procedurally generated AI levels that deliver an action-packed and challenging shooter experience.

Published Jan 14, 2025

Introducing Blitzer

An isometric 3D shooter game where an AI overlord has trapped you in his world. In this realm, he dictates the rules - a world architected by his evil intentions to test your limits. Your goal is to escape its design through dynamic, ever-changing levels filled with traps, hazards, and enemies. Only your skills, quick thinking, and determination will help you survive this hostile digital realm.

Play the game on playblitzer.com

Action-Packed Gameplay

Fast-paced combat requires quick decisions as players dodge and shoot through hazardous environments. With support for both keyboard and game controllers(gameplay only), the responsive controls and fluid movement keep the action intense and engaging.

Procedural AI Levels

Our AI agent generates endless unique challenges, crafting levels with diverse layouts, enemies, and hazards. The AI's fine-tuned difficulty balance ensures levels remain challenging yet beatable.

Live AI-Generated Voice Lines

The Overlord watches your every move - welcoming you with dark humor as he throws you into each new level, mocking you when you die, and making disturbing comments while you battle his general.

Campaign Mode

Experience the campaign mode by battling through a series of unique levels before confronting the Overlord's general in a climactic boss battle.

Survival Mode

Challenge yourself in the endless live AI-generated levels and test your skills to see how long you can survive as the Overlord creates new and unpredictable challenges to push your limits.

Boss Fight Mode

Challenge the intense boss battle repeatedly as you hone your skills to defeat future generals. Each victory brings you closer to mastering the intricate attack patterns and developing new strategies.

AI Level Generator & Browser

Challenge the Overlord as he designs custom levels just for you in real-time. All generated levels appear in the level browser, which showcases playable challenges generated by the player community.

Global Leaderboards

Compete with players worldwide to see who can complete the campaign fastest, develop the best boss-fighting strategies, and survive the most rounds!

The Team

We are two brothers from the beautiful tropical island of Mauritius who share a deep passion for gaming and programming. Our journey has been filled with countless hours of experimentation, learning, and creative exploration - from developing softwares to building web platforms, and turning our dreams into reality by making fun games that people would love to play. When we are not coding, you can find us tossing pizzas at our pizzeria, where we actually built a significant part of the game during quiet periods.
Our roles in Blitzer
Deeshay Algoo - Led game design & development, programmed over 60 different scripts for core gameplay, engineered AI agent prompts and their in-game implementations, and developed visual effects, animations and sound design.
Shahen Algoo - Led infrastructure development using multiple AWS Services, implemented AI systems, designed and developed the frontend and backend architecture, and created 3D models and visual assets.

The Inspiration Behind Blitzer

Our inspiration for Blitzer came from classic arcade shooters and modern roguelike games. We wanted to create something that combined the intense action of traditional shooters with the unpredictability and replayability of procedurally generated content. The concept of an AI overlord creating endless challenges emerged from our fascination with artificial intelligence and its potential in gaming. We saw an opportunity to not just tell a story about AI, but to actually use AI technology to create the game's content, making the narrative and gameplay mechanics align in a unique way.

Our Approach

We set an ambitious goal: creating a medium-scope game in just 50 days (started 24th Nov) while balancing our other jobs. After spending the first week pre-producing the game, experimenting with AI tools on Amazon Bedrock, and seeing what Amazon Q was capable of, we felt confident about meeting the deadline. We would leverage AI to procedurally generate game levels, as well as use Q as a coding assistant to accelerate development, which would ultimately save us days of development time.
We chose Unity as our game engine due to our familiarity with it. We used React to wrap our WebGL game. A setup that played to our individual strengths. Deeshay could focus solely on game development while Shahen managed the art, infrastructure and frontend interfaces.
The fun part is that all the game's menus, AI implementations, level browser, etc… is built using React and AWS Amplify for the backend functionalities. This strategy allowed us to rapidly build the project.

Tech Stack

  • Amazon Q - An AI-powered assistant that accelerated development by providing code suggestions, debugging help, and architectural guidance for both game and web development. It helped us solve technical challenges quickly by understanding context and generating relevant solutions.
  • Amazon Route 53 - A DNS web service that routes domain names and ensures reliable, low-latency access to our game worldwide.
  • Amazon CloudFront - A CDN service that delivers our game files and level browser screenshots globally. While our web application is hosted in Oregon, using CloudFront significantly improved loading times for us in Mauritius.
  • Amazon Amplify - A full-stack development platform that provided ready-to-use components and services. It simplified user authentication, database management, storage solutions, and AI integrations, letting us focus on building game features instead of infrastructure.
  • Amazon Cognito - A secure, scalable authentication system that manages user sign-up, sign-in, and access control. It handles user and identity pools with social provider integration while maintaining security standards and data protection.
  • Amazon DynamoDB - A serverless database service offering fast performance at any scale. Auto-scales based on workload and scales to zero when inactive, providing cost optimization with pay-per-use pricing.
  • Amazon S3 - A secure object storage service used to store and serve our game assets like WebGL builds and level screenshots. It provides high availability and low latency access.
  • Amazon Bedrock - A managed service offering access to foundation models through a unified API. Used for generating game levels and voice lines via Claude Sonnet.
  • Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 - A model that excels at understanding code and generating game levels according to specified rules.
  • Amazon Polly - An AI voice generator service that gives our in-game AI Overlord a menacing voice, generating voice lines in real time during gameplay.
  • Unity - Game engine used to build our WebGL game.
  • React - Javascript framework that wraps around the game, enabling two-way communication and controlling many game states and features externally.

Amazon Q - AI Assistant

Amazon Q proved instrumental in our game development, ensuring we could meet our deadline. Despite our busy day jobs, the speed at which we could produce was mind-blowing. As traditional developers who hadn't used AI coding assistants much, this was eye-opening.
For complex features like 3D model shattering and grid resolution for AI-generated levels with inconsistencies, Q provided efficient solutions in seconds that would have taken us days to develop on our own. We estimate that without Q's assistance, the project would have required at least 70 days instead of 50.
We've uploaded Q screenshots in the game's repository for the judges to review. Below, is a highlight of how Amazon Q helped us figure out and scaffold major features during development. There are more minor cases that we are not including here.
Cases with an * were completely written by Q.
  • Grid Builder - Uses level data generated from Amazon Bedrock (Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2) to construct levels. Q helped set up the system that dynamically determines the placement and types of boundaries, collision barriers that keep the player within the map.
  • Grid Resolver* - AI generated levels sometimes contain inconsistencies, such as gaps in paths that block player progression. Q built a resolver that fills these gaps and corrects errors to make paths accessible.
  • AI Voice Lines - During the final days of the hackathon, Q helped scaffold the foundation for this feature, enabling us to create a working prototype in under 30 minutes. We didn't know about Amazon Polly prior to this.
  • FMOD Setup* - One of the most important uses of Amazon Q was helping to build an effective audio manager. The audio manager provides straightforward control over sounds and music, including muting, pausing, and fading effects.
  • Map* - Uses grid data to construct the UI map and track the player's current position in real-time. It also updates the map when rewards are collected. All done by Q.
  • Player/Boss Death* - Upon death, both player and boss 3D models shatter into pieces, with added explosion forces and visual effects such as trails and fading fragments. All done by Q.
  • Boss Missile System - Q wrote the code that determines surrounding areas available for missile launches based on player position. The code also keeps track of active missiles and make sure they don’t target the same area.
  • Amazon Services - Since we had limited AWS experience before this hackathon, all these tools were new to us. Q helped us understand the systems and assisted with troubleshooting.
  • Image Processing and Compression - When AI generates a level, a feature draws the game visuals, builds the image data, and compresses it for upload to S3. This makes the images accessible from the Level Browser. Q assisted with coding various components, including helpers for image blob creation and compression for effective resource management.
     

Code Example: AI Level Generator

To implement our procedural levels using AI, we tested several models on Bedrock. Claude 3.5 Sonnet v2 provided the most accurate results for our use case. Once we could reliably generate level data, we simply needed to implement it in our web application for prompting and processing, then send the instructions to Unity to build the level.
 

Code Example: AI Voice Generator

Amazon Q helped us quickly implement voice generation late in development by providing guidance on Amazon Polly integration. With Q's examples and documentation for voice synthesis and audio streaming, we successfully added this complex feature while staying on schedule.
 

Challenges We Faced

Discovering the hackathon late gave us a compressed timeline to work with.
Balancing our day jobs with game development became our biggest challenge. We worked deep into the nights, making the most of every available moment for development. Though the schedule was exhausting, we embraced this pressure as it drove us to create an exciting game under tight deadlines.
Our Github activity reflects our dedication during the holiday season, as we coded through family gatherings and other events. We ultimately decided to close our pizzeria for the first 15 days of January to focus entirely on completing the hackathon.
Deeshay:
For Shahen, days without commits were dedicated to 3D modeling and other art-related activities.
The AI level generation system and sound design proved particularly challenging during development. We spent considerable time fine-tuning the prompts and validation systems for playable, engaging levels, while also tackling the time-consuming process of finding and producing the right sound effects.

Things We Learned

We gained invaluable insights into integrating AI as a core, real-time component of gameplay. AI tools like Amazon Q and Claude transformed our development process, letting us accomplish in days what traditionally took weeks. Most importantly, we learned that a small team armed with the right tools and determination can create something truly ambitious and engaging.
Building Blitzer has been an incredible journey that pushed us to our limits as developers and creators. Through AWS services and sheer determination, we've turned our vision into reality. We hope players will enjoy exploring our AI-generated world's endless challenges as much as we enjoyed building them.
 
Play the game on playblitzer.com
 

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