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Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

monkeyball-online.pages.dev

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Re: Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

#51

Post by Tiberium »

calflegal wrote: post #14
unleaded wrote: post #12

For some reason the opening settings page made me think this would be someone who just told claude to make a monkey ball style game.. maybe from seeing too much of that on HN. forgive me for that, this is awesome. As far as i can tell it's not even an emulator or a decompilation running in emscripten or anything like that, they remade the game in TypeScript. love stuff like this https://github.com/sndrec/WebMonkeyBal…

uh that code looks like claude to me

If anything, it seems that the author used GPT 5.2 (-codex) in Codex, which is actually far more capable at such work than Opus 4.5 in Claude Code.

Re: Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

#53

Post by _zagj »

letmevoteplease wrote: post #26
msephton wrote: post #6

Is there any info how this was done?

The author commented on their ko-fi: "there isn't much to say that would require a big writeup - a lot of the code is already reversed, and anything that's missing can be yoinked from ghidra decomp output and cleaned up, so it's just a matter of transpiling to a different language. plus much of the game's proprietary formats are thoroughly documented by the modding community. time consuming but quite easy if you're j…

Another poster commented that it was likely done with Claude.

Re: Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

#55

Post by kilpikaarna »

TZubiri wrote: post #8

[flagged]

Monkey Ball (without the Super iirc) was an arcade game initially. With a banana-shaped joystick and everything. Then SMB added some extra modes and came out as a release title for the Nintendo GameCube. It was probably intended as kind of a low-budget thing, but ended up being recognized as one of the best games for the system, especially early on.

Re: Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

#57

Post by tarantino-sax »

So. this code was most likely generated with AI trained on community decompilation efforts, possibly without their knowledge. I know that the community has not yet reverse engineered custom model skinning for the game, so it does not appear here because it wasn't in the training data. Why would somebody who has supposedly already implemented billboard object support, or as the code calls it "flipbook objects", couldn't just stick a similar animated billboard texture inside the ball? probably because they have no clue how the code actually works or is structured.

It's genuinely impressive that generative AI has advanced to the point where this was possible, but it also feels like this was built backwards, extremely niche mechanics in the game are rendered nearly perfectly, where the base elements of the game had this been built from the ground up are implented wrongly or completely absent.

Re: Super Monkey Ball ported to a website

#59

Post by tarantino-sax »

throwup238 wrote: post #47
TOMDM wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pull Request: chore: remove node_modules I don't see much of a reason to keep a copy of node_modules on the git repository considering they can be reinstalled for deployments and it is generally bad form. sndrec (the author): Thank you for this - I'm newbie at webdev so I wasn't sure what was and wasn't needed. I'll merge this soon. Haha, almost certainly Claude

I went through a bunch of the commits and didn't see a single comment. That definitely seems human to me.

Author claims this was made in 5 days on twitter. Nobody knew about this project until they released it and their inital commit contains 200,000 lines of code. Curious
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