The first (canonical) NotExplosive game!
I had made games before this for various jams, but none of them are good enough to keep visible on my website. Some of them are completely lost to time. Some of them are on itch, but marked as hidden (hidden NotExplosive lore!)
It was also a game that gave me a big revelation about video game AI: If you want AI that behaves like a player, it should have the same controls that a player would have. In the case of Krill or be Krilled, movement is restricted to two inputs and you can't steer and control your velocity at the same time. The AI controlled krill, have the same two-input controls the player does, but they have code to determine which "buttons" they should be pressing.
The twist is: the ai controlled krill is completely random. Of the two buttons they can press, they choose to press left, right, or both randomly on a cooldown. This leads to movement that feels organic and it took like 6 lines of code to write. Sometimes you'll see a krill perfectly steer itself into a piece of food. That is by complete accident.
I used this insight for the AI in Pest Control 8 years later.