The levels
A local AI agent designed all five levels. It ran on one gaming PC, with no cloud service, and worked through a level kit that checks every level before it is built. Nobody edited the levels by hand.
Unity · Desktop browser
NEON KEYS
Guide a glowing orb through a dark maze of neon lines. Collect the coloured keys, dissolve the barriers they open, get past laser grids, plasma fields and patrolling sentinels, and reach the beacon.
Five short levels. A local AI agent on one gaming PC, with no cloud service, designed them. Frontier AI built most of the game around them.
Play
Play in your browser.
Motion and flashes. The game uses screen shake, flashes and strong glow, and has no setting to turn them off. Your device is set to reduce motion.
For a desktop browser with a keyboard. Pressing Play downloads about 17 MB.
Play NEON KEYSOnce it has loaded, the game has the keyboard. If keys do nothing, click it. Press Tab to move out of the game. The FULLSCREEN button in its corner fills the screen.
Open the game on a page of its own →Controls
- WASD or arrows
- Move
- Hold Space
- Pull the camera back for an overview
- R
- Restart the level
- Esc or P
- Pause
- M
- Mute
- Arrows and Enter, or the mouse
- Choose PLAY or HOW IT WAS MADE on the title screen
The title screen has two choices: PLAY, and HOW IT WAS MADE, which shows the setup and the numbers behind the game. Your first key or click there also starts the sound.
Good to know
- There are no touch controls. On a phone, the title screen says the game is best on a desktop with a keyboard.
- Your best times are saved in this browser. The game uses no cookies and loads nothing from other sites.
- So far it has been tested in Chrome on Windows.
How it was made
Who made what.
NEON KEYS shows how much of a game an AI model running on your own computer can make. The game tells the same story on its HOW IT WAS MADE screen.
The local setup
- One gaming PC, no cloud service.
- An NVIDIA RTX 4060 graphics card with 8 GB, and 32 GB of system memory.
- A 35-billion-parameter open-weights model. It is a mixture of experts, so only 3 billion parameters are active at a time.
- Shrunk to 4 bits and run locally with llama.cpp.
The numbers
- 5 levels, each from a short written brief.
- 29 design forms filled in by the agent.
- 2 min 24 s of model time in all.
- 1 automatic repair, 3 designer notes, 0 hand edits.
- Every level proven finishable.
The checks
The agent never placed things freely. It filled in short forms: pick a layout, pick the rooms and which doors lock, then place the keys and hazards. The kit turned the answers into a level and checked it before anything was built. On the last level the agent put a plasma field where a key had to go. The check caught it, and the agent moved the field through a repair form. Unity then built each level and checked that it can be finished.
The game around them
Frontier AI, a large AI model running as a cloud service, built the game shell. The kit supplies the pieces and how they behave: the orb's movement, the keys and barriers, the hazards and the sentinel patrols. Frontier AI added the pause and results screens, the camera, the HUD and the route guide on the floor, the neon look and effects, and the sound and music, which are generated in code.
The local agent also wrote the code for the title menu and the HOW IT WAS MADE screen, from a written spec, checked by automated tests. Frontier AI changed one line of that screen's layout.
Frontier AI also acted as the designer. It wrote a brief for each level, approved the results, and wrote three playtest notes, which the agent applied to levels 1 and 4 through the same forms. After a later play test in the browser, two rules were added to the game shell for every level: picking up a key or opening a barrier saves your restart point when no sentinel is near, and a sentinel that catches you shuts down for a moment. The levels did not change for these.
Credits
As the game shows them on its final screen:
Levels designed by a local AI agent
Game shell and polish by frontier AI
A Catsplat Studios showcase.
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