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Built a football-themed endless runner Lens where players dodge defenders and collect footballs to rack up score and combo multipliers. Drag left/right to steer, avoid obstacles, and chain collectibles for bonus points. Inspired by classic arcade runners but themed around football to tie into my content brand, kobbyy. Focused on tight, responsive controls and a clean retro scoreboard UI.Built this to give kobby'sfootball audience something they can actually play, not just watch and to push past basic face filters into real interactive game design.
The network for creativity
Join 1.25M professional creatives like you
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Creatives on Contra have earned over $150M and we are just getting started
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🕹️ What I Built
I created Neon Byte Runner, a fast-paced retro arcade game Lens for Snapchat inspired by classic endless dodgers and 80s neon aesthetics. Built entirely using prompt-based iteration in EasyLens, the game includes:
Procedural Pixel-Art Visuals: Glowing neon ships, data bugs, energy bytes, and background scanlines drawn in real time for crisp rendering across all screen sizes.
Drag-and-Dodge Controls: Intuitive mobile steering where players dodge incoming "data bugs" and collect "energy bytes" for score multiplier points.
Dynamic Damage System: A three-life mechanic where taking damage physically breaks off spaceship parts (wings and tail) with visual particle flares.
Magical Heart Repairs: Rare falling heart powerups that grant an extra life and visually repair broken spaceship parts back onto the ship.
Chiptune Audio & Global Leaderboard: Custom-generated arcade music and sound effects paired with an integrated HUD and leaderboard to drive replayability.
💡 Why I Built It
Reimagining Classic Arcade Mechanics for AR:
I wanted to capture the instant-play energy of old-school arcade cabinets and adapt it into a social, mobile-first Snapchat Lens. The goal was to create a game that takes seconds to learn, but offers enough depth and escalating difficulty to keep players saying, "Just one more run."
Visual & Emotional Damage Feedback:
Instead of relying on a standard health bar, I wanted players to feel the stakes. Making the ship parts physically break off and scatter across the screen creates an immediate, dramatic feedback loop when you make a mistake—and grabbing a rare heart to repair your ship feels genuinely rewarding.
Pushing the Boundaries of Prompt-Based Game Design:
As a developer, I wanted to explore how far prompt engineering inside EasyLens could go. I set out to prove that you can build complete, highly polished game systems—including state management, procedural rendering, sound synthesis, and dynamic damage states—purely by guiding AI with precise multi-step prompts.
✨ How EasyLens Made It Possible
Using EasyLens, I didn't need to hop between traditional 3D software, external audio workstations, or manual script compilers. I iterated through targeted prompts to handle:
Generating procedural visual assets on the fly.
Setting up custom arcade music and dynamic sound triggers.
Fine-tuning game controls, collision boxes, and damage states.
EasyLens handled the heavy lifting, allowing me to focus on game feel, pacing, and player experience
Saw a fun game on a reel and decided to build it myself instead of buying it! 🛠️ Here is my submission for the challenge: Pop Color Board. I generated it using Easy Lens, tweaked the UI, and it’s ready to go. Remember: avoid the purple!
The Easy Lens Challenge is LIVE! Check out the full guidelines here.
Some quick tips on how judges are scoring 📋
Judges score every entry on four things:
1️⃣ Creativity + originality
2️⃣ Best use of a Tool (games, face gen, Video Transform)
3️⃣ Lens+ performance
4️⃣ We review every submission, so we can tell when a Lens is a remix of someone else's entry. Those remixes just won't carry much weight on creativity and originality, and that's a full quarter of the score.
Original ideas get the most weight. You've got until August 4, 11:59pm PT. Plenty of time to build something only you would think of.
Explore. Play. Create.
