My Own Vampire Survivors: Jerry Banfield Infinite Momentum
I made my own version of Vampire Survivors today, and it's called Jerry Banfield Infinite Momentum. It's totally free to play at jerrybanfield.net. I played a tiny bit while testing it before, but this was the first time I really played the game, and I was super excited to show it off. What's so cool is that this is my own game — a fun game that I get to own. I had a little rainbow gun, and owning the game like this solves so many problems. I'm going to be able to add my own voice lines into it, and I can make up the rules however I want them to be — all the power-ups, everything in there, exactly how I want it. This is the future of gaming, and it only took about an hour or two in Claude Fable.
I am hosting this on ICP because, in my experience, it's the best hosting infrastructure in the world — the safest and most secure — and I build all my websites on it. My Jerry Banfield ICP channel has a lot about that. What makes this so cool is that as a content creator, as a YouTuber, imagine making videos about my own games instead of somebody else's games. Right now, AI is not that great at remaking a heavy 3D game with really great graphics, but with simple games like this one, it's doing fantastic. I made this in one shot — a single prompt. I think you need to be on the $100 a month plan right now to get this, but it was so easy to do. I even decided I wanted a traffic background in the game, and that's exactly what I got.
Why AI Gaming Solves the YouTube Advertising Problem
One of the big problems this solves is that I want to be able to advertise and do gaming vlogs, because a gaming audience is super cheap to advertise to on YouTube. If you're a gamer and you enjoy watching my videos, lots of times gamers want to talk about games, and it can be hard to even find people to talk with — especially friends and family, who often aren't interested in talking about games. And then you can talk with me about all other aspects of real life as well, because I'm a super supportive person. I love doing what I would call gaming vlogs, where I play games in the background and just talk about real life stuff. The problem on YouTube right now is that with most of the main games, you can't advertise. They will allow you to monetize them on your YouTube channel, but you can't run ads and use the ads to promote and sell your own stuff. AI gaming solves that. AI gaming solves a huge problem: it allows me to make commercial content.
What's super cool about this too is that I can monetize it instantly with microtransactions. This game is totally free to play — this is the first version of it — but microtransactions are the easiest way I can monetize, and this is something anybody can pick up right now. You need the $100 a month Claude subscription, and I also used ChatGPT Pro to create the prompt and the game structure for Claude. ChatGPT Pro did the research, and then I used that to one-shot prompt Claude to do all of this. It's pretty easy to get into, but I think there's a huge ceiling for being able to make your own games — and especially if you can make your games and create content about them, that is just an insane combination. I can have a gaming channel where I can obviously play anybody's games I want, and I can play other people's games too. But here's what's really cool: if I play Call of Duty, I can't advertise that. Meanwhile, with this, I could advertise my own game and get huge amounts of people to discover my inspirational videos, where I'm just trying to help someone enjoy their life more. There are all kinds of opportunities from that — I can build an audience.
Discovering My Own Game as I Played It
While I was playing, I took a shot from an envelope and realized those were mailboxes. I had literally never played that far into the game before — I only tested it for a couple of minutes to make sure it worked. Those were mailboxes firing envelopes at me. That is hilarious. I don't even remember telling it to do that. Everything in this has been made to basically be a Jerry Banfield game — my idea, my world. I'm a content creator, and I also made this to be super family friendly. That's something that can be done in a way that's not just for me. It means this can be advertised on YouTube, where there's nothing blocking it from running as an ad — the ads have to be family friendly, and this game is perfectly set up for that. And I can customize each game. If I wanted to, I could have a more adult version of a game — with swearing, or extra crazy commentary, or whatever — and that could be a private microtransaction game that wouldn't be available to the public. This is why AI gaming is so cool.
The game got intense fast. I took several hits right in a row, then grabbed a crate and kept going. AI gaming is really exciting right now, and this is a time when hardly anybody knows this is even something you can do. It reminds me of when YouTube came out — hardly anybody realized you could make YouTube videos. I discovered that in 2011, and rarely did anybody even put together what it means. What's the big deal? So what — you can make videos, and okay, you can get people to watch them. What does that mean? Well, what that means is that you can now work from home and print money online. You see how big of a deal that is. With games, this is the same basic thing. I can now work from home, make my own video games, and then combine that with YouTube.
Five minutes into my run, things were getting insane. And this is the point: now I can just make my own games instead of playing other people's games, which is a huge deal, and then I can advertise those games on Google through YouTube ads. That becomes a platform to encourage you to connect with me and schedule calls. If you want to learn how to do this, join the Jerry Banfield Family — hop in, we can screen share, and I'll share everything with you on a call, answer your questions in real time, and help you go forward each week.
I was getting low on health at that point — it had gotten crazy. The AI built the difficulty, and I wanted it to be a shorter game, because Vampire Survivors takes a bit too long for me. And what's so cool is that if I think the game is a little too difficult, I can just adjust it — tell it the difficulty is too hard, crank it down a little. This is my game, so I can adjust it. Then I died after five minutes in the game. That's rough. So did I want to play again? One more time? I looked at the round miles earned and went back to the main menu, which I had never tried before. It made all of this: an infinity blade, a bright energy arc — I got a rainbow ray and an ICP orbiter. There are settings in there, a how-to-play screen, progress tracking, and even challenges, which is so cool. So I clicked start run and played one more time.
A Limited-Time Opportunity, Just Like Early YouTube
This is just incredible. I've been saying this on a couple of my gaming videos, but do you know what this means? Do you know what it means that you can now make your own game with AI and then create content about your own game? Because you're doing that, all the benefits, all the profits from the game, all the control of the game — you can now have all of that yourself. This is what's beautiful about the future. It's amazing how we depend on all these companies without even realizing it, and then they control us because of that. What happens in the future when I can build my own games — and then, while building your own YouTube is still a little difficult right now with all the hosting, what happens as everything gets more powerful and cheaper and I can just build my own YouTube also? Then everybody can build their own hyper-niche social media network. You've got to really be paying attention to these things in time, because often these opportunities slip away fast. 2011 or earlier was the time to get in on being a YouTuber — that's when MrBeast was starting back then, and that's when I started out, and I've had huge opportunities in my life because of YouTube. Today, yes, I've started six new channels after I deleted everything.
Mid-run, I needed more health. And that's the thing — I could just tell the AI, hey, there's not enough health in here, drop some more health. I could change the symbols on the coins, or whatever. This is so amazing, but it's a limited-time opportunity, because once everybody starts cranking out their own AI games, it becomes like how TikTok was a huge opportunity before everybody started posting on TikTok. Right now you've got a huge audience of gamers who will be really blown away by all kinds of new custom games made just however you want them. And this way you can make games for really specific communities. For everybody following Jerry Banfield, you can start having Jerry Banfield-specific games. And it's like, wow, why would I play another game like Vampire Survivors when I could play a game where the character is Jerry Banfield? That's really cool.
It's a thing that's new, and sometimes when things are new, it takes a while to understand why they're important. AI gaming looks really important to me right now, especially as fewer and fewer tasks even need to be done manually. Entertainment has continued to get bigger and bigger — video games, movies, media, all the watching.
The Future of Gaming Is User-Generated
I got a new weapon unlocked as I played, and it got me thinking: entertainment has all gotten a lot bigger in the last few years as stuff has moved online, and at this rate, there's room for things to get even bigger. Right now, you ain't seen nothing yet. Remember how the web used to be — I hit level 10 already at this point — the web used to be a lot more manual, or really, read-only. Other people controlled it and put everything up, and you couldn't do anything about it. But now, a lot of the content you consume, a lot of where you're spending time, is user-generated content — like YouTube, or Facebook (I'm not on Facebook anymore, but it's an example) — places where the value is being created by users.
To me, this is the future of gaming, exactly what I was living in that run: people making their own games. A lot of the games people play will be games made by other people using AI instead of by big developers — and to me, big developer games have been heading further and further downhill. Right now, AI is still pretty limited, though. This is about the best an AI game can do with a one-shot prompt. But I can make better and better prompts out of this, and I'm interested to see how I iterate different versions of the games. It's incredible for just a single prompt — and right then I got another weapon in the game. This is the first version, and I'm interested to see how much better it can get with future iterations, because lots of times you're going to need some iterations to really reach your full potential.
The Time to Learn AI Gaming Is Right Now
The time to be learning how to do this stuff is right now. This is the time to start becoming an expert on AI gaming and to be creating your own AI games. And at this point, if you're thinking, well, I don't know how I'd promote my own AI game — just share your games with your friends and family, and make some videos about them. If you make them like I made this one, there's already a community you can identify: if you like Vampire Survivors, you might like this game. It's an easy game where there's already a community I can point to and say, hey, they might like this.
The run got crazy really fast. I didn't understand what all the coins flying around me were — I was having a hard time getting them collected — and I needed some more water drops. Then I pulled a mirrored second sweep, which does a double shot. Wow. How cool is it to discover things while playing your own game for the first time? I'm somebody who's been playing everybody else's games my whole life, locked into playing somebody else's narratives, somebody else's world. What's really exciting to me is that now I can make my own games, my own world. If I don't want something based around being a shooting game, because I want more love and light and positivity or whatever, I have that choice now.
Then I went down again. That run was a little longer than the last one, but still — this is a solid quick little game. In five minutes and thirty seconds I had two different runs and got bosses cleared. When I went back, it turned out I didn't actually get any more unlocks, but there's so much customizability here, and I'm really excited about it. If you want to build a channel around your own games the way I'm doing, I share how I grow on YouTube in my YouTube Coaching playlist.
And if you want to talk to me about all of this, join the Jerry Banfield Family and schedule a call with me — that's the best way for me to hear from you.
If you want to play my games, go to jerrybanfield.net — the first versions of all my games are out there for free, and I actually haven't even made any paid versions yet. So I'm interested in experimenting with lots of different early versions.