How the Dogecoin Bit ‘Em Up game ‘Super Doginals’ came to life

The launch of the arcade-style beat-'em-up game Super Doginals comes at an opportune time this month, as the original meme coin, written on the Dogecoin blockchain, sees a resurgence of interest and attention, with DOGE hitting a three-year price peak.

But there are a few signs that planned releases are taking hold especially at this time. Anonymous creator Pimax told Decrypt that the game was created as a tribute to the fun vibes that have defined Dogecoin and its community for over a decade.

“I created Super Doginals in honor of the Doge spirit and playful culture,” I added.

Super Doginals is especially polished and robust for a web game, let alone a crypto game written directly on the blockchain. It's simple in design, taking cues from classic button-mashing like Fatal Rage and Streets of Rage, but it has attractive artwork and music, and really captures the spirit of meme coin fans.

Pimax says the game is written in WebAssembly language and developed using OpenBOR, an open-source game engine, to keep it compatible with the Doginals protocol standard.

He also said the key to a game written entirely on the blockchain is a “lightweight” engine. Meanwhile, the old-school pixel art movement both blends well with the retro gameplay and doesn't take up too much space, although the original music is a big challenge. has created

“Pixel art was a great choice because it's lightweight and matches well at high resolutions without requiring additional data,” Pimax said. “The hardest part is the music is 35 minutes in total – so we compressed it into the web-friendly OGG format to make it Dogecoin compatible.”

Pimax wanted to put everything on-chain, just like Dogecoin's blockchain itself with Doginals – a protocol that, like earlier versions of Bitcoin, allowed users to write artwork, code and other data on-chain. That could bring similar properties to NFT collectors, but could also enable interactive games and apps that live entirely on-chain.

Builder first experimented with chain games on Dogecoin earlier this year, porting the original shareware version of first-person shooter Doom as well as launching a Doge-themed riff on Tetris.

But SuperDoginals is an extremely ambitious project – not only because it's original, but because the scale of the game requires the use of multiple texts that work as one in a process called iteration. Doginels then pulls all the pieces together into a single, playable game, and that approach opens up potential add-on features.

“We wrote the game engine, assets, and utility functions separately, then tied them all together in the final Doginal,” Pimax said. “This approach allows others to build on Super Doginals by adding their own levels, characters, or creating entire games based on existing on-chain content.”

Players can have a version of the game in their own Dogecoin wallet and create a “proxy” text that can be played through compatible wallet applications. Pimax said that details on this process will be shared in the near future.

Super Doginals was clearly born out of Pimax's passion for Dogecoin and its community, but they shared that AI tools were used to make this a unique project to manage. In their view, AI tools only help them fulfill that vision rather than removing the human touch.

“As a solo developer, I've used AI tools to accelerate development — whether it's designing art, writing music, coding, or getting insights,” he said. They allow you to create.

“It still required months of hard work, but AI combined with ingenuity and determination allowed me to tackle this project on my own,” Pimex said.