The Pink Blur

The Pink Blur - are you fast enough? Take a journey through time and space where it doesn't matter how far you go, it only matters how fast you go!!

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Inspiration

When my kids were younger, we invented together a set of superheroes - including The Pink Blur, a superhero so fast she can journey across space and time, usually to fight her arch-enemy, Dr. Volcano. Since then, I've owned ThePinkBlur.com domain name - like many other developers with domain names they never use - all with the vague idea of one day turning it into a comic, or a story ... or a game. Enter the Amazon Game Builder Challenge and I finally saw a chance to bring the Pink Blur to life!

What it does

The Pink Blur is a side scrolling game where you run, fly, dodge and blast your way through hoards of enemies - with the novel feature that you don't finish a level by reaching a certain distance, but by reaching a certain SPEED!! That's because all the Pink Blur cares about is speed! That, and her family and friends of course!

How I built it

With AmazonQ!! I'd built iOS games before, but never one using react, so relied heavily on AmazonQ to teach me phaser.js and how to make a game like this. It's deployed on AWS, using a S3, Cloudfront (& WAF), Route 53, ACM setup.

142 commits on GitHub, 45,860 lines added, 4187 removed! Only 4k lines removed, that definitely means I need to refactor a bit more!!

Challenges I ran into

If anyone has ever tried to create a "game background image with absolutely no mountains" using GenAI, and managed to do it, you're a better prompt engineer than I am! The graphics were so hard - without having a designer (other than my kids with suggestions!) getting the game looking good was the hardest piece.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Making a game that my kids think is fun! When I set out to make the game I'd a few requirements in mind:

  • It has to be fun - measured by my testers' (my kids!) interest or lack there of, in the game. Six year olds can be ruthless with their time and opinions ; as I started building the game mechanics with no real gameplay or fun, mine would try it out and pretty much immediately say "Can I play Friv now?". I knew it would need to be good for him to want to play it again.
  • It has to be easily accessible - for me that meant available on a web browser, no download needed etc. Just go to ThePinkBlur.com and start playing.
  • It needs to be different - the challenge isn't just about using AmazonQ, it's about making an innovative game; again - this is difficult!

I think I've achieved a lot of that, but mainly the fun piece!

What I learned

How to use AmazonQ to build something we hadn't built before! I detail more in my blog post (linked below) the process, but basically I used AmazonQ for almost EVERYTHING coding related! From what game framework to use, to how to add lives, how to add blaster sounds - basically any idea I had for the game, the AmazonQ plugin in my IDE told me how to do it.

What's next for The Pink Blur

More levels and improved gameplay! I've so much more ideas to add to the game, it needs way more enemies, needs to be harder, and needs more items in the in-game shop (not using real money, but coins you collect during the game!) and just MORE!

It's also not mobile responsive yet - I built it for my kids to use on a Mac, so if you want to try it out, use a computer web browser!

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