How Dogecoin Beat ’Em Up Game ‘Super Doginals’ Came to Life

The launch of arcade-style beat-’em-up game Super Doginals came at an opportune time this month, being inscribed on the Dogecoin blockchain right as the original meme coin saw a resurgence in demand and attention, with DOGE hitting a three-year price peak.

But there’s little indication that the rollout was specifically timed like that. As pseudonymous creator Pimax told Decrypt, the game was created in honor of the fun vibes that have defined Dogecoin and its community for over a decade.

“I created Super Doginals as a tribute to the Doge spirit and playful culture,” they said, “adding my own touch to it.”

Super Doginals is particularly polished and robust for a web game, let alone a crypto game inscribed directly onto a blockchain. It’s simple in design, taking its cues from classic button-mashing brawlers like Fatal Fury and Streets of Rage, but has charming artwork and music, and really does capture the spirit of the meme coin’s fandom.

Pimax said that the game was developed using OpenBOR, an open-source game engine, which was ported to the WebAssembly language to run well in web browsers and remain compatible with the Doginals protocol standard.

It’s also a “lightweight” engine, they said, which was key for a game that would be fully inscribed onto a blockchain. Meanwhile, the old-school pixel art vibe both paired well with the retro gameplay and didn’t take up too much space, though the original music posed a bigger challenge.

“Pixel art was an ideal choice because it’s lightweight and scales nicely on higher resolutions without needing extra data,” said Pimax. “The heaviest component was the music—35 minutes in total—so we compressed it into the web-friendly OGG format to keep it Dogecoin-compatible.”

A screenshot from Super Doginals. Image: Decrypt

Pimax wanted to put everything on-chain, right on Dogecoin’s blockchain itself via Doginals—a protocol that, like the earlier Ordinals for Bitcoin, lets users inscribe artwork, code, and other data onto the chain. That can yield assets akin to NFT collectibles, but it can also enable interactive games and apps that fully live on-chain.

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

But Super Doginals is a much more ambitious project—not just because it’s an original creation, but also because the size of the game requires the use of multiple inscriptions that work together as one in a process called recursion. Doginals then pulls all of the pieces together into a single, playable game, plus that approach unlocks potential add-on features as well.

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

Players will also be able to create a “delegate” inscription to have a version of the game in their own Dogecoin wallet, and playable through compatible wallet apps. Pimax said that details on this process will be shared in the near future.

Super Doginals was clearly born from Pimax’s own passion for Dogecoin and the community, but they shared that AI tools were used to make this a manageable solo project. In their view, the AI tools only helped them execute on that vision, rather than strip away their human touch.

“As a solo developer, I used AI tools to accelerate development—whether drafting art, composing music, coding, or gaining insight,” they said. “Today’s AI tools give developers superpowers. While they don’t replace human talent or creativity, they provide a massive productivity boost, making it possible to create a game like this.”

“It still required many months of work with a lot of hands-on effort,” Pimax concluded, “but AI, combined with ingenuity and determination, made it possible to tackle this project on my own.”