Source note: Local copy of a Summer Into AI 2026 submission originally published on Substack. Screenshots, video, and audio found in the post body are mirrored locally when publicly accessible; profile and avatar images are intentionally not copied. Read the canonical post.
Week 1 of Summer into AI 2026 — theme: 8-Bit America. Demo 2 of 3.
After shipping Found a Republic I had a thought — the Declaration of Independence is literally a list of grievances. It's already a wave structure.
Liberty 1776 is a Space Invaders-style arcade game where each wave is a real grievance from the Declaration. You fight your way through four rounds and then face King George III as the final boss. Beat him and the screen explodes in 4th of July fireworks.
Theme connection
The Declaration of Independence is a numbered list of grievances — it was already a wave structure before I touched it. Each grievance is a distinct enemy type, the colonists are the player ship, and King George is the final boss. 8-Bit America isn't the skin on this game — it's the actual design document.
The waves
Round 1: Taxation Without Representation
Round 2: Quartering of Armed Troops
Round 3: Cutting Off Our Trade
Round 4: Dissolving Our Legislatures
Final Boss: King George III — fires three-way volleys, health bar and all
Each round opens with an intel dispatch explaining the real historical grievance before you play it. Pure canvas, pixel sprites hand-coded in character maps, 8-bit audio synthesized with the Web Audio API.
Controls
← → / A D — move
Space / Z — fire
On-screen buttons work for mobile too
How this connects
Found a Republic was all AI — every decision, every headline, every legacy generated live. Liberty 1776 is the opposite: no AI at runtime, pure arcade. Building both back to back made the gap obvious. One demo had AI doing everything and a simple game wrapper. One had a sophisticated game and no AI at all. The question was: what if the AI was the game itself — not the wrapper, not the mechanic, but the actual experience? That became Hall of the Republic.
What I was reacting to
Timestorm Baseball by Eric Rhea (@advisoryhour) put Founding Fathers vs. the British at Wrigley Field — genuinely inspired matchup. It clicked for me that the Declaration's grievance list was already a perfect level progression waiting to happen. They picked the matchup; I picked the format.
Also worth playing: Parade Candy Chaos by Kady Godfrey (@kadygodfrey) — the first team entry, built with her 9-year-old. Best reminder in this whole competition that the best co-pilot doesn't overthink it.
Built with
Claude — coding partner throughout; the sprite maps, boss health system, and Web Audio synthesis were all built collaboratively. No AI at runtime — this one is pure arcade.
Vanilla JS + Canvas — no frameworks, every pixel drawn manually
Web Audio API — 8-bit sound synthesized at runtime, no audio files
Vercel — deployment
Where to play
Demo: liberty-1776.vercel.app
Code: github.com/GlimmerForge/summer-into-ai
Week 1 series
Demo 1: Found a Republic — 8-bit civics sim — Claude reasons out every decision live
Demo 2: Liberty 1776 — Space Invaders meets the Declaration of Independence ← you are here
Demo 3: Hall of the Republic — First-person history walk — talk to witnesses, hear their voices
Summer into AI 2026 · Theme 1: 8-Bit America · Competitor references: Timestorm Baseball by @advisoryhour · Parade Candy Chaos by @kadygodfrey
Original source
Canonical Substack URL: https://jakestrait5.substack.com/p/summer-into-ai-2026-liberty-1776.