Tina the Destroyer: Turning Family Photos Into a Playable Arcade Game

I built a small local arcade game called Tina the Destroyer with Python and Pygame.

The idea was simple and personal: I took pictures of my daughter, converted them into game-ready pixel sprites, and built a one-screen game around that character. The result is a fast arcade loop where Tina smashes falling rats before they hit the ground.

The Core Idea

I wanted a game that was:

• Fast to play
• Easy to understand
• Personal and fun

So I designed a tight gameplay loop:

• Move left and right
• Press Space to perform a ground smash
• Squash rats for points
• Lose a life when a rat reaches the bottom
• Game over after 3 missed rats

From Photos to Sprites

The visual pipeline started with real photos. I cleaned and adapted the character images to work as sprite sheets and exported key poses:

• player_idle.png
• player_smash.png

I also prepared enemy and effect assets:

• rat.png
• rat_squashed.png
• impact.png
• title.png

For audio, I added smash, miss, and looped music effects, with fallback loading so the game still runs if a file is missing.

Building the Game

The game is organized into small modules:

• main.py entrypoint
• game.py state machine and game loop
• entities.py player, rats, and impact effects
• settings.py tuning values
• utils.py asset loading and fallbacks

Key features I focused on:

• Clean state flow (TITLE, PLAYING, GAME_OVER, QUITTING)
• Responsive movement and smash timing
• Difficulty scaling over time
• Score/lives HUD
• Best-score persistence to JSON
• Graceful fallback behavior for missing assets

Vibe Coding the Project

I vibe coded this with gpt-5-3.codex, iterating quickly on gameplay feel, tuning values, and production details (asset fallbacks, restart flow, audio handling, and UI polish).

Source code: JordiCorbilla/tina-the-destroyer: tina-the-destroyer

That pairing made it easy to keep momentum: prototype fast, test, adjust, repeat.

Why I Loved This Build

This project sits at the intersection of family creativity and engineering. It started as a fun idea with photos and ended up as a fully playable local arcade game I can run anytime with:

pip install pygame
python main.py

Small scope, real personality, and a complete game loop. Exactly the kind of build I enjoy.