I highlighted in previous posts that LLMs seem to be pretty good at making ports. I recently ran an experiment to see if I could port and update a game I wrote 17 years ago for iPhone. The original game was written in Objective-C and used the cocos2d-iphone engine, needed upscaled graphics to accommodate modern displays (the first iPhone’s screen resolution was quite small) and needed to have the online leaderboard removed, since the company that offered the leaderboard service is no longer around.

Needless to say, I was impressed when given some prompts, the original source code and assets and some specifications, the AI worked tirelessly overnight and rewrote from scratch a functional port, which needed a few small modifications and tweaks. This included writing from scratch a basic 2D and particles engine based on cocos2d, translate iOS specific calls to Android equivalent and adapting the game for a variety of screen sizes.

You can find the result here.

I’m glad I was able to give a new life to this game, as I originally spent 9 months (part time) writing it and learning about mobile game development. I don’t think I would have ever found the time and patience to write a port for Android by hand, but AI definitely made it possible.