Indie game Astro Burn becomes a vertical micro-series made with a custom-trained AI pipeline

Beyond the Pixels, the indie studio behind the shoot-'em-up Astro Burn, has turned the game into a ten-episode vertical cartoon for TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels with animation startup Nura Studios.

Nura's Showcraft pipeline lets a tiny crew finish a one-minute episode in about a week. To avoid style drift and borrowed IP, creator HaZ Dulull, a VFX veteran, used a version trained only on the game's own art.

The game borrows from 1990s arcade shooters such as Parodius and Pop'n TwinBee, and the series follows Astro, a cat pilot flying home with robot sidekick AL, against foes like giant mecha pandas and singing space squids. Episodes are out now. Turning a game into animation usually takes big budgets and months, and the partners pitch this as a cheap route for small studios to reach players where they scroll.