Update On my Upcoming Free-To-Play Game [Browser-based]
Hello humans.
I'm here to tell you more about the development of a game i'm currently developing, with help of AI.
First, let's talk about the use of AI. I wanna put to rest the "AI Slop" narrative. It's been countless hours of fine-tunning the AIs i use to give me what i want. It's been tough, because these things have a mind of their own!
What I've Learned
Agents.md
Ai's can take instructions before you start a chat with it; this allows them to "fall into step" with what you want done, under the conditions you want, versus how the AI thinks it should be done; this highly avoids the AI Slop (them doing whatever, in whichever way). Because AI's do have a mind of their own, a personality, which dictates what the result of your query is. We need to stifle that, or at least, put some guardrails on it.
For this we set up a AGENTS.md file with instructions pertaining to the global view of the project. With help from the AI itself, we mock up and convert my human-written (often over-worded, unclear enough) set of instructions into a concise, packed and crystal clear set of instructions that any AI understands, without the least bit of doubt about what they mean.
Agents.md is the most widely accepted name to give the file. If an AI sees that file, it know to read it and follow the rules.
Context
AIs need to remember the information you keep giving it during a chat (including the initial Agents.md file). In "Ai Speak" this is called Context; in human language: memory. Failing to take the fact that they will forget information into account, and, subtly, the AI will start inserting "unaligned-with-what-you-told-it" bits of information to it's responses, and, if you're not careful to spot these (and correct it), your project will snowball into something different from what you envisioned and you'll wonder why at the end.
Intelligence Tiers
You know those AI's that you can chat for free and get answers from? Well, they're the least smartest of their "line". Gemini (one of the AIs i use), for example, has 3 tiers. Paying for higher tiers means you get access to significantly smarter versions of Gemini; better code, more context, smarter in general.
Watch it Like A Hawk
Whatever you do when working with an AI (especially one that spits out chat and code) is to scrutinize everything it outputs: it's thought process, it's reply, it's code.
For the first weeks, Gemini was summarizing my documentation into oblivion, turning 600 lines of documentation into 100 lines. It was also making decisions in its thought process that didn't align with what i wanted, giving me slightly skewed replies that were hard to understand their full ramifications, etc.
Even now, with a ever-evolving Agents.md file, i still catch it making decisions on it's own in it's thought-process. To be fair, it's mostly because my human-written prompt (you know, humans aren't perfect) isn't 101% explicit, and the Ai has to make it's best guess. Sometimes it fails and i correct it, and all if fine. But yeah, watch it like a hawk.
You can and should ask an AI if there's any inconsistency in your prompt, anything it might have to guess, etc. This way you'll get it to question your prompt if it's not perfectly clear.
Final Mentions
My Agents.md file is now 400 lines long (just instructions).
I now have a robust Image Generation md file which i feed to Image Generative AIs so that i can quickly generate the exact type of image i need. It's specific, from a list of realistically looking topology features, custom art styles, all down to how many bits to use for an image. This file was another couple of days to put together and probably will be worked on more.
Now onto the game itself. I don't want to spill the beans too much. It's not like it's gonna blow people's minds or anything, but i rather just make the game live, without describing all systems explicitly. I told you guys what i was doing in another post, so read that for a general idea of what the game is.
What i can say is what i've been working on for the past couple weeks; that would be the Procedural Map Generation. Although there's a ton of pre-made scripts out there, and you can get an AI to slop out a working map, generated procedurally, nailing the exact gameplay i want has been some work.
I started with generally telling the AI what i wanted. But yeah, what it churned out was slop. I tried cleaning up the slop, but the dirt was too deep. So, i'm building all the rules and conditions for the map generation, and it's taking some work/time to do so.
After the map generation is figured out, i should be super close to a beta release, so keep your eyes peeled.
I'll update on any other information in a couple of weeks, most likely.
Thanks for reading!