Robot Pirate Ninja

We got noises, so we pushed out a new version. Available now at RogueVibe.net and RogueVibe.app.

It’s all still quite rough and preliminary, and we have a LOT more stuff to add, but we’ve made enough progress to throw this out there for testing and play!

So “Howdy, y’all!” as the saying (and sound effect) goes (speaking of placeholders that will likely be toned down in future versions…).

It’s now not quite possible to start a game without hearing the (modified) voice of yours truly, please enjoy. As per, we’ve added a sound effect mute button to ignore all of this.

It can also now be accurately said that we are now over a year into development. What started as a bit of a lark and a test of new technology, has transformed into something I’ve enjoyed immensely as I start to bring one of my visions to life*.

Over the course of the year we’ve had a few gaming firsts (maybe) and some big scares. One of the main ones was being (one of?) the first actual working games to incorporate custom character portraits. Just upload an image, select a character species/profession (or RNG it) and press the button and go. I’ve had a blast doing this, and if you want to try something fun, use a picture with two people and select “Ogre” as your creature type (Ogres often have two heads, you see).

This feature has been the biggest hits with the game’s biggest fans so far (my kiddos).

We are also the first game (that I’m aware of) to incorporate custom “exit” photos. As your character is defeated (or victorious) a custom photo (including final equipment) is generated and submitted along with the character’s permanent record to the all knowing DB (as is the record of every battle fought in the dungeon).

Some are cheap-ish “photoshops”, some are a bit more fun. The exit photos also incorporate the image of the victorious monster, if available. This had led to some fun and interesting results. The prompts continue to evolve, as I work to incorporate new ideas and guide things to something close to consistency.

Over the year we’ve gone through a few models, mostly sticking with various iterations of Gemini. Gemini’s 2.0 models were…not the best, but often provided quite dramatic results. The release of Nano Banana (Gemini 2.5) was ground-breaking. It offers a TREMENDOUS amount of power, and the text generation/placement abilities were next level when introduced, and still state-of-the-art (a few months later….this industry is moving insanely quickly, but the real world isn’t). It’s font game is for real.

Gemini 3 and 3.1 offer *even more power*, but at a price. That price is both in time and money. While these models are more than capable, they are also (usually) more than I currently need. There are exceptions. The “Realist” species exclusively uses the Gemini 3.* series of models. This is because it’s *really good* at doing photorealistic stuff. So I use it to create photorealistic fantasy creatures, i.e. “Realists” (like Zombies, the Realists have an RNG sub-class that is used solely for the aesthetic value and differentiation). One of my favs…a (Beholder) Realist Elementalist.

Or a (Saiyan) Realist Thief…

Or this (Sponge) Realist Knight, heading off into the depths.

My Realists are fun, but a bit slow, so they are special. Right now we have a need for 111,150 piece of individual monster art. Were I to commission them at about $50 per…it would be more money than I have.

We’ll have more of that discussion later, but as it stands, of those 111k *possible* combinations, only 45,273 have actually been attempted to be summoned and have histories in the all knowing DB. Of those 45K+, we have 29,692 pieces of unique art assets generated (mostly at the quality you see here, although 2.0 was a bit rough).

These are all “one-shot” prompts. There are some big misses. Over the course of the year I created a new application “slopify studio” to allow for natural language image editing. I’ve probably updated about 50 or so images, all with natural language. It turns stuff like this…

Into this…with exactly the words you would use to tell something to do that (“remove the extra arms”).

That’s a Level 3 Nymph Xenobiologist (from the future, it looks like).

It’s a great tool, and allows very quick edits to something like this, with the obvious slop…

Into this…which is less obviously a completely random and unintentional piece of non-art depicting an (ultra-kawaii) Predator Tourist (issuing a challenge to the player).

Note how easily it removed the “RV” logo as well. Yeah..it’s immensely good at similar edits.

On to the tough parts of the year.

I did not do a particularly good security audit of slopify.studio and it’s currently not working. It’s still right here. But that version no worky right now, because I deleted the key someone stole and spammed my account with a computer using the API to create a TTS speech saying, “Hello!”….over and over and over again. Not the funnest morning as I tried to sort that one out.

Which bring us to the obvious danger of “vibe” coded and deployed apps…keys. API Keys are magical things. (Data Architect Voice) There are two parts to any security system: Authentication (you are who you say you are) and Authorization (you have access to the resource you are trying to use). Unrestricted API keys let you ignore all that bullshit and just do stuff.

I was using those. Badly. It will be back, as there are basic things one can do to not expose the key by doing dumb shit and no security audits because one was tired and the kids are yelling and what?! didn’t you eat yesterday?

Sorry, where was I? Oh, right, forgetting to do important things. Longer story shortened and we find that key was stolen, and used for a couple hundred bucks of bullshit. So it goes.

My account was also totally whacked and disabled thanks to another security bug. This was *less* my fault, but as a solo *everything* guy (I’m a CEO now, woot!), there’s really no one else to blame and it’s a waste of time doing so anyway, just fix it.

But I couldn’t, because my account was totally disabled. All images gone. DB wiped. Couldn’t access anything. Why?

So…there was this thing…and that thing allowed whoever to run whatever code they wanted on one’s cloud server (after being remotely compromised). So someone started mining something or other on the free (to them) compute. Google’s alarms went off, and my account went poof. And Rogue Vibe went dark.

But that was not the end, my friend, for you see…I actually have some friends in the real world.

One of those friends happened to be a VP at Google (apparently there’s more than one, who knew?) so a couple Google One DMs later (I assume) and someone with a less than entry level title is quickly apologizing profusely for the issue and is there anything else we can do to help.

And we’re live again, and then we upgrade our packages…and change the keys again (do this often, Data Engineer Voice).

And been fairly clean sailing on that side since.

So what the next year going to bring? That’s a great question.

My theme for 2026 was supposed to be “Integration” as we pull together other things (like the URA) and the backstories for characters generated on HaikutheNews (note: still a lot of work on that for telemetry. Different models tell very different stories, so tracking which ones tell the story, and narrate it, is something I should be tracking/exposing), so we’ve still got a few months for that, but the ToDo list is long.

After adding equipment, skills, and abilities to RV, we still need to expand them all and fill in all the spaces. Some species have starting equipment and lore-related skill and abilities, others are still completely generic. As we built in a loot system that incorporates the likely starting equipment of each class/species, we have a lot of holes in our ‘rogue-like’ (HA!) replayability. Getting an early Dragon Egg can take you a few levels deeper than if you didn’t have one, for example. But we have A LOT of holes to fill.

And fun little descriptions to write.

Also, doing species sound effects has been a BLAST and now I have like 80 more ToDo, each waiting for some inspiration before I move forward with intent. Same with the theme songs.

Play balance is barely an afterthought, but there is some forethought in each addition to the dungeon milieu. Classes and species have a few different options for both powering up stats and limiting growth (EXP costs/Food availability), and I have a few simple levers for tweaking monster difficulty and scaling (always by Dungeon Level, never by Player Level…probably make an exception to that, now that I think about it…).

All in all the notion of “vibe-coding” a fun to play game has been well-proven out for me. I enjoy playing my game. It gives me smiles (and now many of the sound effects create giggling). These tools are unquestionably capable for empowering individuals to bring creative visions to life. There are SO MANY decisions that have to be made, each step along the way, each with intent and vision…the AI doesn’t really have any of that. It’s a servant, not a savant.

It’s quite sharp, and so, so dumb. I need to write another post about all that, as this one is getting quite large, but understand: the power of “Agentic Engineering” as the next step of “Vibe Coding” is real. The cost is also quite real. The play between all these factors in the real world we all share is remarkable to observe.

The Singularity is here, and we are living through it.

The development of this app is a solid real world example. I had started this through “Firebase Studio”. It was a web-based UI for interacting with Gemini and had a “Publish” button (this kicked off a Cloud Run workflow that packaged and deployed your application). This was how we went live for most of the year.

Then Google announced they are sunsetting Firebase Studio and to migrate to their Anitgravity ecosystem.

In the new ecosystem, here is how they, in the docs, suggest you deploy your application…

What this does is kicks off as series of internal requests (and llm “Skills” stuff…more on that later, maybe, but they are just detailed plain text natural language markdown guides with AI sprinkles on how to do stuff), which leads it to try a command from the command line (with your permission of course) of “firebase deploy”.

However, with the sunsetting of some Firebase things (like Firebase Studio), the library *actually* used to deploy Firebase apps is now called “firebase-tools”. So the correct CLI command (which it eventually finds, every time) is actually “firebase-tools deploy”.

If you follow the guide, you will burn through about $2-3 worth of tokens as it figures this out (every time). Learning *HOW THINGS ACTUALLY WORK* and *ESPECIALLY ALL CLI TOOLS!!!* is how one goes from “vibe coder” to “software engineer”, as it were.

Unfortunately many of Google’s docs (and others) emphasize this agent-first approach. I have my reservations, obviously. There’s been enough HUGE and STUPID mistakes the AI has made that make is very crystal clear to me, even as a general advocate for the technology, to be quite wary of using it for life and death, mission-critical situations.

As we’ve seen in the disastrous War on Iran and Bombing of 168 School Children, the idea of a school for young women *on a Naval base* was apparently too much for Grok to grok. And so atrocity follows.

These tools are powerful. Immensely so. The power to create, the power to destroy, the power to *do*, all are the same power ultimately.

How we choose to use them will define both ourselves and the future.

Happy gaming, see ya in the Dungeon.

* Rogue Vibe is the “starter dungeon” for a larger game project named and codenamed ’50’. Extract loot (RV), build your town, upgrade, crossbreed, do more stuff…hopefully we’ll have enough years to make it all real**.

** We actually have a lot of this done, prior to RV starting, but recall…2026 is about *integration*, so hopefully we’ll get to it eventually.