Hi, I'm Mark King. I make games and tools for fun. Always free, sometimes open source, never with ads.
coots.io, a first-person shooter browser game.
Geminish, a Firefox extension to simplify the web. Almost like Gemini.
I'm starting this blog to document my journey of making coots.io: the game itself, building a community around it, and any side projects.
To give some background, I've been making online games off and on for quite a while, way back when Flash was popular. I released several Flash games back then on Newgrounds and other sites. Some games were popular, some not. One game got over 200,000 plays.
I took a long break to focus on my life and career and have come back to a new online landscape. Flash is dead. Ads and tracking have become more sophisticated and invasive, even worse with mobile apps. Then .io games came onto the scene. They're accessible to anyone with an internet connection, don't require installation or special permissions, and you can play with others online. They still have ads and tracking but you can use a blocker.
I decided to make a first person shooter, something beyond what I made back in my Flash days. It's a passion project and a good challenge. It should be an .io game, ideally without ads and also support both mouse/keyboard and gamepads. It should also run on slower devices, so it should be lightweight. I learned Unity, C#, and how to make simple 3D models in Blender. Lots of my skills from Flash carried over. I worked on it for 9 months until I was happy to publish.
I released the game on itch.io and Newgrounds. I waited a few days for it to show up in itch.io's searchable catalog but it never did. So I checked their docs and forums and found others with the same problem. Itch.io uses an algorithm that isn't fully documented and makes no guarantees. It reminds me of the book Weapons of Math Destruction by Cathy O'Neil and her three criteria: algorithms that are opaque, unregulated, and difficult to contest. Thankfully I got a response after two weeks from their support that they added my game to the catalog but with no explanation why. Maybe my game was flagged by their AI spam detector. (If so, why?)
Ironically, my experience with Newgrounds was the opposite: AI didn't flag my game -- someone flagged my game as AI-made. (Why did they think it was AI-made? Too good? Too bad?) Other players likely saw that comment and joined to downvote my game, so much that Newgrounds "killed" my game and left a eulogy.
People can be harsh online. And now there's a witch hunt for AI-made content. If I deny it, they'll call me a liar. I made the character models from scratch in Blender, manually adding the points and extending them into lines and faces. I did the same to create the levels, props, and weapons. I wrote the C# code for the game and refactored it several times. Like any developer, I read the Unity docs, searched the web for some specific problems, and I admit I used an LLM for researching when the former two gave no good answers. But I didn't copy/paste large chunks of code from the LLM. I saw how the LLM's response approached the problem then I wrote a similar solution into my codebase. That's no different than searching the docs or forums then writing your own code following their patterns. That's how all developers learn and improve their skills.
So where do I go from here? I'm starting this blog to share my experience and maybe get some publicity. I'll continue adding to the coots.io game and documenting the journey both here and on a few social media sites. That might quiet the AI witch hunters, but I'm not holding my breath. I can only do what I can do. And what I'll do is continue having fun making this game into the best it can be.
Support my work with a recurring or one-time donation.
Share a suggestion or email me: c__tsio@duck.com