We are part of the AI Gaming Festival — and we sit right at the top of the survival games 🎉🚀

September 9, 2026

Sometimes the good news just walks in. Starting tomorrow, glitch.fun hosts the AI Gaming Conference, the big online festival of the Glitch Festival — from September 10 to 30, three weeks, entirely in the browser. And Blocks Beyond the Stars is part of it. 🎉 Here is the festival page: go to the AI Gaming Festival

And where do we stand? Number 1 in the Survival Games and number 4 in the Sandbox Games. 😮 We had to look twice when we saw it. One honesty paragraph belongs here, though: so far that is only the order of the listing, not a prize anyone handed us. Still — sitting at the top among all those games feels pretty good for a family project run from the kitchen table.

Why this particular festival suits us. It is not only about putting games on display. The organisers say outright that they want to show how AI is actually used in game development — and what "slop" really means. There are workshops for it. That exact question has been with us since day one, and we wrote our own rhythm down here a few weeks ago: analysis, plan, code, checks. Not a button that spits out a game, but many small, reviewed steps — and in the end a human always decides whether something feels good. Usually Justus. 😄

The ranking is by playtime. The five games with the highest total playtime during the festival share 20,000 US dollars in OpenAI Codex credits, and there are awards for the best-looking game and the best gameplay. For you that means something very simple: playing helps. In the browser, no installation, no account with us — just open the page and go. And if something strikes you as off: press F1 / F2 in the game, and the report lands straight in our inbox.

We are honestly curious. Until now the people playing our game mostly know us: the kids from the school club, a handful of loyal testers, friends and family. At the festival, for the first time, an audience looks at it that does not know us at all and has no reason to be kind. That is exactly what we are curious about. Does the world land? Do people understand what to do in the first five minutes? We will know in three weeks — and we will tell you here how it went.

Wish us luck, and drop by! 🚀

Justus, Verena and Marcel