DEV Community: Anik2812

I Built a Platformer That Gaslights You — Coins Steal, Spikes Heal, and The Exit Door Kills You 🫖

Anik2812 — Mon, 13 Apr 2026 04:20:44 +0000

This is a submission for the DEV April Fools Challenge

What I Built

DEFINITELY NOT A TROLL GAME™ — a platformer that looks completely normal but systematically betrays every gaming instinct you've ever developed.

Level 1 is honest. It teaches you the rules: collect coins, avoid spikes, reach the exit. You feel safe. You feel smart.

Then Level 2 happens.

Here's what you need to know:

Trust nothing. Every rule established in Level 1 is a lie designed to hurt you later.
The game actively mocks you. It features an integrated Gemini 2.0 Flash AI bot designed specifically to roast your gameplay decisions in real-time.
The settings menu is a trap. The volume slider fights back. The "Uninstall" button refuses to work. The "Fun" toggle turns itself back on.
Even the quit button gaslights you. Quitting requires multiple attempts, negotiations, and emotional manipulation.

The game has 10 levels of escalating betrayal, culminating in a final boss fight against... a "Next Level" button that refuses to be clicked.

The settings menu has a "Difficulty" selector (does nothing), a volume slider that fights back and resets itself, a "Fun" toggle that re-enables itself when you turn it off, and an "Uninstall" button with 6 escalating refusals ("Error: Cannot uninstall. The game IS your computer now.")

The quit button requires 6 attempts. On the 6th try it says "Just kidding 😂" and force-resumes the game.

Your browser tab title changes as you die:

3 deaths: 💀 3 deaths... | TROLL GAME
20 deaths: 🚨 POLICE: Stop playing | TROLL GAME
40 deaths: 📞 Your mom called. She's worried.
50 deaths: 🏆 50 DEATHS. ARE YOU OK?

The FPS counter cycles through: 420.69 FPS, NaN FPS, POTATO FPS, FPS.exe crashed, √-1 FPS

The cookie banner reads: "We use cookies to track your failures and share them with absolutely everyone."

Demo

▶ Play DEFINITELY NOT A TROLL GAME™

Runs entirely in the browser. HTML5 Canvas, vanilla JS, zero frameworks, zero build steps. Works on desktop and mobile (touch controls included, because suffering should be accessible).

Code

Anik2812 / not-a-troll-game

🫖 DEFINITELY NOT A TROLL GAME™

A perfectly normal platformer that systematically betrays every gaming instinct you've ever developed.

🎮 PLAY THE GAME HERE

🛑 What is this?

This is a brutalist-themed, web-based platformer built for the DEV April Fools Challenge. It is designed to gaslight the player through deceptive mechanics and a sarcastic AI assistant.

Nothing is as it seems. Level 1 trains you to trust the rules. Level 2 and beyond actively punish you for learning them.

Features

10 Levels of Escalating Betrayal: Play across levels where coins steal your points, spikes heal you, exit doors kill you, and safe platforms collapse.
"HELPFUL ASSISTANT™" AI: An integrated Gemini 2.0 Flash chatbot that actively roasts your failures in real-time based on your current death count, mistakes, and score.
Graceful Degradation: If the API fails or rate limits, the game falls back to a massive dictionary of handcrafted roasts…

View on GitHub

5 files. No frameworks. No dependencies. Pure, artisanal disappointment:

File	Lines	What it does
`index.html`	~300	Structural skeleton with all overlays and modals
`style.css`	~525	Brutalist design system, glitch effects, scanlines
`game.js`	~1070	Full canvas engine: physics, collision, particles
`levels.js`	~355	10 handcrafted levels of escalating betrayal
`app.js`	~920	AI chatbot, Konami code, achievements, chaos

How I Built It

The Stack

HTML5 Canvas — Custom 2D game engine with tile-based collision, coyote time (8-frame jump buffer), particle systems, and screen shake
Vanilla CSS — Brutalist design tokens, noise overlays, scanline effects, periodic glitch text animations via CSS clip-path
Vanilla JS — Zero dependencies. Everything runs inside a single IIFE
Google Gemini 2.0 Flash — Powers the in-game AI chatbot AND generates personalized victory reviews
Web Audio API — Procedurally generated sound effects (oscillator-based — every jump, coin, death, and level complete is synthesized in real time)
Built with Google Antigravity — The AI coding assistant that helped architect the game engine, design the troll mechanics, and debug the collision detection

The AI Integration

The game features a "HELPFUL ASSISTANT™" — a chatbot powered by Google Gemini 2.0 Flash with deep game-state awareness.

How it works: The system prompt tells Gemini to act like "a bored IT support worker who secretly hates their job but drops weirdly poetic one-liners about existential suffering." It receives your exact death count, current level, score, and recent game events (died to spikes, collected trap coin, walked into fake door) as context, then generates unique roasts.

Key design decisions:

Non-repeating responses: A Set-based tracker ensures the AI never says the same thing twice in a session. The system prompt itself includes recently-used responses and explicitly instructs Gemini to avoid them.
Keyword matching with fallback: 25+ keyword categories (coins, spikes, doors, exit, coffee, teapot, etc.) each have 3-5 unique responses with their own non-repeat tracking. If the API is rate-limited, these fire as graceful fallbacks.
Fisher-Yates shuffle bags for death messages — the 26 death messages and 8 sub-messages are shuffled like a deck of cards, guaranteeing you see every message before any repeats.
Rate-limiting aware: 5-second cooldown between API calls with exponential backoff on 429 errors. The game never breaks if the API is down.

Gemini also generates a "Performance Review" on the victory screen — a sarcastic AI-written summary of your entire playthrough:

"Ah yes, 47 deaths. That's not a playthrough, that's a documentary about perseverance. Score: functionally irrelevant. Rating: 3/10, and 2 of those points are for not uninstalling. — Management"

Easter Eggs

Konami Code (↑↑↓↓←→←→BA) triggers a full-screen HTTP 418: I'm a Teapot experience with RFC 2324 references, HTCPCP protocol headers, and animated CSS
Clicking the "4.9★ Rating" on the menu — also triggers 418
The AI chatbot: mention coffee, tea, latte, espresso, or brew → "Error 418: I'm a teapot. Per RFC 2324."
Death #25 displays: "🫖 The teapot weeps for you. Error 418."
The favicon is literally a teapot emoji: 🫖
The FPS counter includes 418 FPS in its rotation

⚠️ SPOILER WARNING: The Mechanics (For the Judges)

If you are judging the code and don't want to suffer through 10 levels to see the joke, here's what the engine actually does under the hood:

💰 Coins steal your points — half the coins are traps that deal damage AND subtract 100 points.
🔺 Spikes heal you — the pointy death triangles restore health. The signs say "AVOID SPIKES!" They're lying.
❤️ Health packs damage you — the heart-shaped pickups are weapons of mass betrayal.
🚪 Exit doors kill you — 3 out of 4 doors are instant death. The signs explicitly point you to the wrong ones.
✅ "SAFE" platforms collapse — ISO-9001 Certified for disappointment.
Level 5 is "Opposite Day" — literally nothing means what it says.
Level 7 is a carbon copy of Level 1 but with everything inverted. The sign says "Relax. It's Level 1 again." It's not.

Prize Category

🏆 Best Google AI Usage

Google Gemini 2.0 Flash is deeply embedded in the gameplay — not as a gimmick, but as a core mechanic:

Context-aware AI companion that ingests real-time game state (deaths, level, score, recent events) and generates unique, non-repeating roasts
AI-generated victory reviews — personalized sarcastic "performance evaluations" created by Gemini at the end of each playthrough
Graceful degradation — the game works perfectly without the API via keyword-matched fallback responses, so judges always have a working experience
Built entirely using Google Antigravity — the AI coding agent that helped architect the engine, write the troll dialogue system, and debug the final button's fleeing behavior

The intersection of "world-class AI" and "deliberately terrible software" is the joke. We used the best tools available to build something that provides zero value. Technology.

🫖 Best Ode to Larry Masinter

This game is a love letter to RFC 2324 and HTTP 418:

The Konami Code triggers a theatrical 418 screen with RFC citation, HTCPCP protocol headers, X-Larry-Masinter: Legend, and the classic nursery rhyme ("The requested entity body is short and stout / Tip me over and pour me out")
3 discovery paths to the teapot: Konami code, clicking the rating, and a hidden tile in Level 1
The AI chatbot responds to ANY coffee/tea reference with RFC-accurate 418 errors
Death milestone #25 references the teapot
The credits include a dedication: "Larry Masinter — RFC 2324 (1998) — HTTP 418: I'm a teapot 🫖"
The favicon is a teapot
The FPS counter shows 418 FPS

Larry Masinter gave the internet its most important error code. This game gives the internet its most important platformer. Neither serves any practical purpose. That's the point.

🎭 Community Favorite

The game is designed to generate stories. The tab title changes. The AI roasts you personally. The cookie banner steals your dignity. The quit button fights you. And the "Share Your Shame" button on the victory screen copies your stats to clipboard in a pre-formatted post:

"🏆 I just beat DEFINITELY NOT A TROLL GAME™ with 47 deaths and a score of -200. The coins robbed me. The spikes healed me. The doors killed me. The button ran away. I have trust issues now."

Between the rotating fake reviews on the menu ("I didn't know I could be gaslit by a platformer" — @trust_issues_69), adaptive death messages that never repeat, and a settings menu where the Fun toggle refuses to turn off... I think this might be the game that makes people screenshot and share.

Built with spite, caffeine, and Google Antigravity. No teapots were harmed in the making of this software. Several keyboards were.

Dedicated to Larry Masinter, who in 1998 wrote an April Fools RFC that became a permanent part of the internet. We should all be so lucky.

Code Alchemist CLI: Transforming Code with Magic

Anik2812 — Mon, 12 May 2025 06:57:53 +0000

This is a submission for the Amazon Q Developer "Quack The Code" Challenge: Crushing the Command Line

🚀 What I Built

Code Alchemist CLI is a powerful, elegant command-line tool crafted to automate common code improvement tasks across multiple programming languages. As a student passionate about writing clean, maintainable code, I built this tool to simplify the repetitive parts of development and make code enhancement more accessible.

Whether you're diving into legacy scripts or kicking off a new project, Code Alchemist CLI boosts your productivity by offering:

🧠 Code Analysis – Quickly inspects structure across multiple languages, including:
- Python, JavaScript, Java
- C/C++, HTML/CSS
- Go, Ruby, Rust
- TypeScript, PHP, Swift
- And many more text-based file types!
📝 Auto-Generated Docstrings – Instantly creates clean, readable documentation for your code.
🔄 Refactoring Assistance – Transforms unoptimized code into more efficient and readable forms.
✂️ Import & Code Optimization – Cleans up unused imports and cluttered comments.
🪄 Multi-Language Support – Works seamlessly with 20+ file types and programming languages.

It's a perfect companion for developers, students, and small teams seeking to improve code hygiene and maintainability without depending on heavy IDEs or paid extensions.

📦 Code Repository & Setup

🔗 https://github.com/Anik2812/Code-Alchemist

Quick Start Guide:

# Clone the repository
git clone https://github.com/Anik2812/Code-Alchemist.git

# Navigate to the project directory
cd Code-Alchemist

# Make the setup script executable
chmod +x ./setup.sh

# Run the setup script
./setup.sh

🖥️ Demo

🧪 Try the demo to preview changes without writing them:

./demo.sh

📽️ Comprehensive CLI Commands

Here's how easy it is to use Code Alchemist CLI:

# Analyze a file
./code_alchemist.py analyze filename

# Refactor a file
./code_alchemist.py refactor filename

# Generate documentation for the file
./code_alchemist.py document filename

# Suggest performance and security improvements
./code_alchemist.py optimize filename

# Generate project dashboard
./code_alchemist.py dashboard filename

# Setup project structure and config files
./code_alchemist.py setup filename

# Run all transformations at once
./code_alchemist.py transmute filename

💻 Using Code Alchemist in Different Environments

Windows Subsystem for Linux (WSL) Support

If you're using Windows Subsystem for Linux, you can easily access files from your Windows drives:

# Access files in Windows drives
cd "/mnt/(drive name)/path to the file"
# or
cd "/mnt/c/Users/YourUsername/Documents/YourProject"
# or
cd "/mnt/d/Development/YourProject"

Pro Tips for WSL Users:

Use /mnt/ prefix to access Windows drives
Common drive mappings:
- /mnt/c/ for C: drive
- /mnt/d/ for D: drive
- And so on...
Ensure you have the correct permissions to access the directory

Cross-Platform Compatibility

Code Alchemist is designed to work seamlessly across:

Linux
macOS
Windows (via WSL)
Windows Git Bash

🎥 Video Demonstration

🔗 Watch Full Demo Video

Supported Languages and File Types

Code Alchemist supports a wide range of languages and file types:

Programming Languages:
- Python
- JavaScript
- Java
- C/C++
- Go
- Ruby
- Rust
- TypeScript
- PHP
- Swift
Configuration and Markup:
- Markdown
- JSON
- XML
- YAML
- INI
- HTML
- CSS
- Shell Scripts
- Batch/PowerShell Scripts
Other Text-Based Files:
- Configuration files
- Plain text files
- And more!

Screenshots

Analyze structure in a single command.

🤖 How I Used Amazon Q Developer

Throughout the development of Code Alchemist CLI, Amazon Q Developer was like a coding partner—always available to support, debug, and refine my ideas. Here's how I integrated Q Developer into my process:

🧩 Modular Planning: Used Q Developer to brainstorm clean function breakdowns and organize the CLI structure using argparse, os, and pathlib.
🛠️ Refactoring & Docstrings: Q Developer assisted in creating generalized logic for code transformation and accurate docstring generation, handling edge cases gracefully.
🧪 Debugging: It provided quick, reliable solutions for path resolution issues, encoding errors, and text parsing bugs.
📚 Documentation: Helped polish project documentation, CLI help text, and inline comments for better readability and professionalism.