UFO 40

UFO 40 is a love letter with a build system. Inspired by Mossmouth's UFO 50 — a collection of fifty "lost" games from a console that never existed — it builds the fictional Beamdown Softworks console for real: 27 cartridges so far, each a faithful tribute to one UFO 50 game, with original pixel art, chiptune music, and levels all drawn from scratch. The screenshot shows the game library: 50 cartridge slots, NEW tags on unplayed games, and a preview pane for UNDERDELVE, the Barbuta tribute.

The engineering is gloriously old-school: plain C11 with zero dependencies in the core — a 320x180 indexed-color software renderer, a four-channel chiptune synthesizer with its own music format, a scene system and a save system. A thin SDL2 layer carries that core to modded PS Vitas, Windows/Linux, and the browser via Emscripten, where you can play it right now. Every cartridge has a design document mapping each mechanic to its source, and each was checked against its UFO 50 original by an independent review before being fixed.

And it is, by its own proud declaration, vibe-coded: "built by directing an AI coding assistant (Claude Code), which wrote the code, pixel art, music, levels and tests from my descriptions, research notes and play-testing feedback." 257 commits, 13 releases, and a jukebox with every tune in the console. The name stayed 40; the library didn't.

Note: This project is curated by the VibeFix editors from public sources. All rights belong to the original creator.