Space Goose: a 2D Pixel Art Pet Project with Unity and Junie

#gamedev #ai #pixelart #unity2d

Hey everyone! 👋
I decided to run my own little game jam: a fast pet project in the genre of 2D Horde Survival with Tower Defense elements.

The Setup

The idea is simple:
Somewhere in deep space, a lonely astronaut goose stumbles upon a broken portal. To get back home, he needs to repair it. But while he tinkers with the wires, endless hordes of cosmic monsters rush at him.

That’s basically the whole plot 😅 - the rest is pure chaos.

Tech Stack

To speed things up, I decided to use everything I had at hand:

Unity (2D) - core gameplay.
Aseprite - pixel art editing.
GPT - concept generation (goose, monsters, turrets).
Junie (AI agent in Rider) — generating and fixing code.
Itch.io - assets for backgrounds and extra stuff.

First Steps

First, I needed the main character. DALL·E generated a bunch of different versions, and in the end I assembled one unique design - with plenty of my own pixel drawing on top in Aseprite. That’s how my astronaut goose was born 🪿🚀.

I used Junie to generate character movement, then added a Particle System for the jetpack flames — worked out pretty nicely. The trickiest part was making the movement feel like it’s happening in space: instead of stopping instantly when the player releases a key, the character keeps drifting for a bit due to inertia.

For space backgrounds I didn’t bother generating anything; I just grabbed a free pixelart backgrounds on itch.io

Monsters

The first enemy was drafted in DALL·E as a rough concept and then fully redrawn in Aseprite. For animation, I kept things simple: a basic open/close mouth cycle plus a squash effect while moving. The chase AI script for the monster was generated in just a couple of minutes with Junie.

Later I added an “infected astronaut” with a parasite instead of a head - kind of like a Half-Life headcrab 👾

Turrets: Goose Engineering Madness

I didn’t want boring machine guns or rocket launchers. A game about a space goose has to be weird and funny. That’s how my favorite turrets came to life:

Toaster Turret 🍞: fires bread slices like a real toaster blasting into the ceiling.

Gramoquack 🎶🪿: a gramophone with a horn shaped kind of like a goose beak, inspired by its form. It fires a powerful “quack” sound wave that sweeps away everything in its path.

KFC Turret (Kill Fu**ing Corn) 🌽💥: inspired by a Family Guy joke. Instead of chicken drumsticks, it fires corn - the goose’s sworn enemy (I don't know why 😅) .

Cucumber Turret 🥒☣️: a jar of pickles on a base. Fires poisoned cucumbers that apply DoT damage to enemies.

Coding with AI: Pain and Joy

Let’s be clear: AI agents speed things up, but there’s no magic here.
Example: I needed to destroy projectiles once they left the arena (bounded by a PolygonCollider2D).

GPT and Junie suggested 100-line “warp-jump star system” solutions, while the real fix was just a simple OnTriggerExit2D with Destroy(projectile) and detecting a projectile by it's tag. Five lines of code. I found it in some random seven-year-old YouTube video 🙃

Takeaway: results depend heavily on how precisely you phrase the prompt and how much context you provide. Without basic knowledge of the tech you’re coding for, AI will mostly get in the way.

After that, I started adding more gameplay details step by step:

First, I gave bullets actual damage so monsters can finally be killed 💀
Then I added a Wave Manager - Junie generated it in about a minute, which was pure joy.
Next came a custom cursor: I hid the system one and replaced it with a sprite following the mouse.
I also built a turret selection menu where turrets can be rotated left or right 👉👈
And finally, I gave the goose a small animation upgrade to make it feel a bit more alive.

Conclusion

The project is still in active development. I’m not aiming for perfect code or flawless pixel art - the goal is to have fun and see how much AI can actually speed up gamedev. Sometimes AI agents save hours, other times they drag you into over-engineered rabbit holes where a 2015 YouTube tutorial has the real answer.

I’m continuing to work on the game, and I’ve already got a pile of ideas for new monsters, resources, and turrets. So stay tuned - more updates are on the way 🚀

If you’re curious about this project and want to catch the updates first, come hang out with me on Telegram: CaveOfCode

P.S. The posts are in Russian, but you can always translate them 😄