This week's game, Cageomel is somewhat of an oddball.

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There's a weird geometric shape, and your ship only really has one bullet at a time, and there's waves of enemies but it's only really one enemy, and there's a ton of bullets being fired at you.
It's really not a normal shoot-em-up, but .. It also kind of is.

The game started as me trying to make a nice geometric shape on the screen, from there the circles were added at cross-points, and from there the player ship.
If you think of classic Space Invaders, there's one ship, one bullet onscreen, and a set of baddies up top. This is more or less identical to that.
You still only get one bullet, except because it looks like a grappling hook, your head isn't going "Only one bullet?!" and is instead going "Ooooh, my grappling hook missed by a pixel!!! Grrr!!"
It's a subtly different form of frustration!

Similarly, the little balls are essentially just the invaders moving side to side, except now they move around in different directions.
And there's little lines joining them to each other. And not always well, either!

But it plays differently, and it feels different.
It's a transformative idea, but it's pretty much the same game.
It's like how Space Invaders is pretty much Breakout, except the ball and paddle are a ship and bullet, and the blocks are little alien sprites.

There's rarely an original idea out there, any more, and as curiously different as Cageomel might appear, it's still just a Space Invaders clone, at its heart.

Originality is hard, nowadays. Practically every game you can find has that something that came before it.
As much as I might think that I'm full of creativity, I'm really not. I've recently been looking through images that the AI Art Generators have made, hoping for a spark of inspiration. And that's layer upon layer of things that aren't exactly original!!
Even the name for this week's game, Cageomel, came from the fact that it's a "Geome"tric shape that looks a bit "Cage" like. .. Except Cageometry had a number of Google results, whilst Cageomel didn't.
It's not original. It just looks that way.

Over on SoCoder we're currently wondering whether "New AI Song Generator on the Block" LoudMe is original or not. It looks and sounds like it might just be reusing Suno's assets, rather than being a unique thing of its own. The discussion of uniqueness and originality got me thinking about that a lot, and it's what sparked this morning's blog.

Sorry for the waffle! But I hope it helps to show that, even something that appears to be unique and original, isn't always.
Sometimes it can be. Sometimes, like with Cageomel, it can start as something else entirely, and somehow get dragged back into being just another Space Invaders clone.
*shrugs*

Thanks for listening to my Ted Talk.

A.I. Corner

Today's Suno Song is..
1. Take the blog post above,
2. Ask Claude.ai to turn it into catchy lyrics
> Reveal 🔎
3. Feed a snippet of an old song of mine (Fanatically Nuanced) into Suno
4. Ask Suno to extend it, using the lyrics that Claude gave me.
5. Choon!!

Not original, but definitely creative.

: Download | Suno Link

Alternative version
: Download | Suno Link
Sung by Suno


"Cartoon @Derek is unoriginal" by ArtFlow.ai

> Reveal 🔎