I’ve been working on a collectible battler game idea that’ll utilize AI to create literally infinite numbers of characters with unique abilities. I’m still not completely sure it’s feasible, but I think it’ll work. I’m ready to start to work on it after a lot of testing and design.
Here is a concept trailer:
The video doesn’t discuss the game mechanics much but focusing on some of the technically interesting pieces: Infinite possibilities.
I’m still not totally sure that it’s feasible to do without a human in the middle and I’ll probably start by creating a boatload of characters by hand w/ aid and see how much of the process I can pass off to agents in the workflow from concept to spritesheets. As long as there is an agent that can review the assets and possibly even edit them, then it should be feasible to get AI to do the whole flow.
Another interesting piece of the concept for the game is that the player character is unique and blends their own attributes into the characters that they create, and the items they farm and craft. This makes trading a particularly interesting proposition because you can get not only items from other factions but also they’ll be infused with the backstory of the user that’s creating them, so when they go to blend together to mint a new character, the results will factor all of this into both the visuals as well as the attributes and abilities of the character created.
And because each character is unique, my plan is to actually make the story in the game actually unique per playthrough.
Imagine playing Cyberpunk 2077, but instead of the Corpo/Streetkid/Nomad backstory at the start of the game, the entire thing is generated just for you based on your own life, the people around you, relationships you have. Instead of just being a story you may or may not respond to and enjoy, the game world will create an experience that’s relatable based on the information you can provide about yourself. The character becomes an in-game reflection of you and your history and experiences and relationships. The tutorial will draw out your character’s relationship with the world in a way that’s completely custom to you. Maybe quest events will continue to add more “backstory” to the character, which will allow you to change your “essence” based on how you interact with the game so that you’re never stuck with a static quality but can change the piece of “you” that you’re baking into crafted items and characters.
This is a highly ambitious concept, and I have a really good idea of how to make this work without it costing boatloads in tokens. I fortunately am not completely GPU-poor, so I can run a small model like Phi-3 and hammer it without racking up huge fees. The new Gemini2 Flash model is also excellent and dirt cheap but it’s a little bit verbose, probably for the sake of improved logic (Chain of Thought). I noticed that Claude has also been performing better lately with improved logic but more token output. I’ll have to experiment to find the best price/performance and figure out a revenue model.
For minting the NFTs, as long as there is more than the gas fees spent to mint, or a market like Axie’s where there are taxes to apply to trading, the cost of generating becomes less of an issue. Because the story pieces will be fairly static, likely with new chapters that roll out, it’s possible to batch the story generation up as well, which reduces the token cost/burden – as an example, OpenAI have a batch API with a 24 hour turn-around time so it would be possible to scaffold all of the character content per individual and then use the batch APIs to get a story together. You’d still want to use agents to review and check safety, compare to user input to ensure nothing funny is going on. I’m sure human eyes would be needed for a good long while.
It’s an interesting idea, maybe overly ambitious especially for a first game. I’ll have to table a lot of these features to get the game together, but they are the most interesting and technically challenging features that I haven’t seen done before.