It started the way the great scientific breakthroughs do: with a nine-year-old asking a very serious question. If you farted hard enough, could it launch you into the sky?
A very serious scientific question
My older son asked it with a completely straight face, and it turned into one of those surreal conversations you can only have with a nine-year-old. How much fuel would you need? Do beans count as rocket science? How far could you actually get? Somewhere between lift-off and the Moon, it stopped sounding like a silly question and started sounding like a game.
To settle the important details, the kids then held a proper design meeting with ChatGPT in voice mode. Half the team was under ten, the other half was a chatbot, and it went surprisingly well. Afterwards I asked ChatGPT to write the whole thing up as a Markdown file, and that became my first game design document. The game has evolved a lot since, but that file is where it really started.
Why not?
I already had an Apple developer licence for other reasons, so my usual excuse ("I'd have to set all that up first") was gone. That left the same question my son had asked, just in grown-up form: why not? In Italy we'd call it a colpo di testa, a decision made with your heart rather than your spreadsheet.
I picked Apple's SpriteKit, because the first version only needed two things: some basic particles and a few blocks that could fart. A fart, it turns out, is just a particle emitter with ambition. The very first hero was literally a red block, and it flew just fine.
The fun part
Building the interface was the best bit, and it's probably still the best thing about the game. Interfaces are my home turf, and doing one in a higher-resolution pixel style felt more like playing than working. From there the game grew the way games do when kids are involved: one more food to fuel up on, one more character, one more planet. Then another. Then Uranus, because of course.
The original plan was simple: the Moon for free, and a ridiculously low fee to unlock the rest of the solar system. This year I switched to ads instead, so now every planet is free for everyone, and the old unlock became an optional PERKS pack with two extra characters, bonus foods and no ads between runs.
Four languages, one joke
AI also gave me something a one-person studio could never normally afford: translations. The game speaks English, Italian, French and Spanish, and I can personally vouch for two of them. Translating fart jokes turns out to be an art of its own. The All-Rounder became Il Completo in Italian, Le Polyvalent in French and El Todoterreno in Spanish, and "Jack of All Toots" became, with great dignity, Maestro del Pedo.
The hard part: the art
Finding the right look was much harder, mostly because of the pineapple-pizza problem (see: my drawings). So the kids drew the characters instead. I scanned their sketches, used ChatGPT to turn them into cleaner reference images, and gave those to PixelLab to make the pixel art.
PixelLab could also generate the animation frames, and I was rather hoping it would do the whole job by itself. It did not. In the first automatic runs, some characters changed completely halfway through an animation. At one point one of them simply turned into the Hulk. Impressive, but not ideal for a game about farting to the Moon.
So I ended up making some sprites almost by hand, using an image-to-pixel-art converter as a starting point and Pixelorama for the animations. In one of the latest updates I went back with Claude Cowork driving the PixelLab tools, and the animations are a lot smoother now. I still update the game every now and then, because it's fun. Nobody has turned green since.
Sound: I tried. I really tried.
For the sound effects I did the honest thing first and tried to record real farts. It turns out they don't come on demand, and the ones that do never turn up while the microphone is on. In the end ElevenLabs made both the noises and the music, with the slightly chiptune, pixel-ish sound the game needed. Some jobs are better left to the robots.
Under the hood
Behind the scenes there's a backend I built in Laravel, and I enjoyed that almost as much as the game itself. It looks after the scores and leaderboards, and it lets me see how the game is actually being played and spot problems early. Yes, I have a dashboard for farts. No, I'm not sorry.
So, can a fart get you to the Moon?
In this game, yes. And with the right food, all the way to Uranus.
