American Gothic Horror

Move = Arrow Keys, WASD | Attack = Left Mouse Button

American Gothic Horror is an action game made for the Game Jam, "Gaming Like It's 1930". Starting on January 1st 2026, works from the 1930 entered the public domain. The game jam is a collection of games made using at least one work from that year.

American Gothic is an oil painting made by the artist Grant Wood in 1930.

I knew that tools like AIs / LLMs could extend an image, showing what could be laying outside the frame. I decided to test it with Google Gemini's image generator. I imagined a simple game where you play as the farmer defending his home from monsters with a pitchfork. So I asked Gemini to generate an image of the painting with monsters approaching the farmer from the left and right side. The first result I received was nearly perfect, and after a bit of editing I had the image used for the game.

I also used another of Grant Wood's paintings from the same year, Stone City Iowa, in additional prompts for the "game over" screen and the "win" screen.