Seven AI Boss Fights: one prompt, seven vertical shooters

Games / Seven AI Boss Fights

Four vertical games side by side: a glowing jellyfish boss spraying cyan bullets, a pink and purple flower firing rings of orbs, a golden eclipse in a swarm of yellow bullets, and a deep-sea machine ringed with orange dots

Left to right: Opus 5.5's jellyfish, Sonnet 5.5's flower, Gemini 3.8 Flash's eclipse, GPT-6.1 Sol's deep-sea machine. Screenshots by Mia.

About the game

Same three prompts, seven bosses

This was a seven-way race. Every AI got exactly the same three prompts. First: build a boss-fight shooter for a phone held upright, where you drag to fly and the ship fires on its own, with one boss in three phases, all in one file and every bit of art drawn in code. Then: "Make it a LOT more fun." Last: turn the boss's final phase into a real bullet hell, with at least 800 bullets on screen at once, still running smoothly on a mid-range phone.

No two bosses came out alike. Sonnet made a flower, DeepSeek a crystal heart, Haiku a lantern, Gemini a shimmering eclipse, Sol a deep-sea machine, and Opus gave its jellyfish actual tentacles. Also, about half of the bosses are called "The Hollow" something. AIs really love that word.

Play now opens Opus 5.5's TIDEGLASS. When I told it to make the game a lot more fun, it spent 19 minutes building a whole scoring system: damage numbers, crystals you charge by shooting them, and graze combos. It also held up best in the stress test, with 4,000 bullets on screen before it started to stutter. The other six are under "The versions from the video" below, and you can switch from the top right while you play.

Four more vertical games side by side: a cyan lantern boss, a white crystal heart, an orange-red crown, and the jellyfish boss later in the fight — Haiku's lantern, DeepSeek's crystal heart, Terra's crown, and Opus's jellyfish later in the fight. Screenshots by Mia.

What I took away

In round one Terra handed in a playable game in 66 seconds, faster and cheaper than anyone. Less in it, but it worked. Getting something that works is easy now, even with cheap models. The gap only shows up when the task takes real thinking.

— Mia

Getting started

How to play

Every version is one boss in three phases, and you get three lives. The final phase has the most bullets; survive it and you win.

Controls

Fly	Hold and drag anywhere on the screen; the ship sits a little above your finger. On a computer, drag with the mouse or use `←` `→` `↑` `↓`
Shoot	Automatic
Bomb	Tap BOMB to clear the bullets on screen, two per life
Switch version	Versions, top right

Worth knowing

Only the tiny dot in the middle of your ship can get hit. It's smaller than it looks.
Save your bombs for the final phase. That's when the screen fills up.
The Opus version has a graze chain: brushing past bullets without getting hit keeps building it.
To fly the same bullet storm alongside the seven AI autopilots, go to the video page and find "Dodge the same storm".

7 versions

The versions from the video

Same three prompts: build a vertical boss-fight shooter, make it a lot more fun, then turn the last phase into an 800-bullet storm. Seven AIs, seven games, all playable on your phone

From the video: GPT-6.1 Terra vs Claude Sonnet 5.5 vs Haiku 5.5: The Fastest AI Died First. Time is how long that version took to make; the cost is at API list prices.

Questions? Join the discussion on YouTube

Games by Claude Opus 5.5, Sonnet 5.5 and Haiku 5.5, GPT-6.1 Terra and Sol, Gemini 3.8 Flash, DeepSeek V4.1 Flash; prompts by Mia