Red Panic is written in C on VUEngine, the Virtual Boy engine by Jorge Eremiev and Christian Radke, and fits a 2 MB cartridge.
One person, one AI assistant
One person directs the game: the ideas, the worlds, the choices, and the verdict on the console. An AI coding assistant (Claude) writes most of the code and the checks, through written roles: an architect plans, a coder applies, a tester judges. The intention is human.
Every place starts as a plan, with its depth planes and its idea, before it is built.
Tested in an emulator, then on the console
Every build is tested in an emulator before it is kept: scripted sessions play it, capture frames, and measure time and memory. The builds that count are flashed to a cartridge and played on a real Virtual Boy; what the console shows decides.
In numbers
Counted by a script from the git history, the session logs and the game, on 2026-10-16. The session figures are floors: only what the logs show.
The game: 8 planets of 5 places, 7 crossings, 46 music pieces (jingles included); the demo ROM uses 1,502,915 of the cartridge's 2,097,152 bytes (72 %), the whole game in the beta ROM 2,054,663 (98 %, its build of 2026-10-16).
The history: 1,650 commits, 860 lots, the plan rewritten 266 times, 68 passing test verdicts.
The sessions: 270 prompts written by a person, 163 hours of active sessions, 100 of them with the loop working alone.
The runs: 1,271 builds, 1,144 emulator sessions, 54 cartridge flashes.
The tools
VUEngine and its toolchain, for the game.
Mednafen, run headless, for the automated tests.
Python, for the checks, the plans and the pictures.
A flash cartridge and a Virtual Boy, for the last word.