Not a Bot!
Nostalgic, old-web inspired clicker game. Play it on itch.io
Submission for Ludum Dare 2023, created with my game dev team.
Game Overview
- Buy as many bears as you can while getting past pesky captchas! ʕっ•ᴥ•ʔっ
- Automate your clicks by downloading shady botting programs off the internet
- Captchas grow increasingly more absurd as your automation becomes more efficient. Can you prove that you’re not a bot?
Final Results
We placed 187th overall out of 2000+ entries. It was an unexpected but happy surprise to place in top 50 for humour, haha!
| Category | Score | Average (out of 42 ratings) |
|---|---|---|
| Overall | 187th | 3.987 |
| Fun | 100th | 4.05 |
| Innovation | 196th | 3.825 |
| Theme | 868th | 3.59 |
| Graphics | 242nd | 3.776 |
| Humour | 48th | 4.25 |
| Humour | 48th | 4.25 |
While promoting our game, I got to interact with many other talented developers and artists. I’m grateful for all the wonderful comments we received.
My Thoughts
I got to lead the design for the first time! Even though we weren’t entirely sure that clicking captchas could turn out to be “fun”, I wanted to challenge my team and I to pursue an experimental idea. It ended up being our best game yet, and I’m proud to see that it was well-loved by the community.
My goal was to recreate a few nostalgic web experiences: snagging limited goods from online stores, downloading shady programs off the web, and getting frustrated by popups and impossible captchas.
The incrementing difficulty of the captchas is meant to be an analogy for compounding AI growth. As these technologies get smarter, it becomes harder to prove the validity of your identity.
Designing the captcha questions presented an interesting philosophical exercise – how do we define categories that only a real human could identify? We began steering into subjective qualities like ethics and aesthetics, but that risked making the game too difficult.
It seems like modern captchas also struggle with this problem. Since this project was created, image recognition and labelling have gotten much better, and captchas have indeed gotten harder. It’s cool to see some of our ideas show up in the wild
