Chat GPT is making AI the hottest subject right now. I wanted to dive into how AI could help improve or add to a video game without making a whole game into an AI procedurally generated mess. People have tried this idea out with mixed results, and I fully expect some to keep trying repeatedly. No. Dear reader, I want to expand this idea, keep the AI in a contained area of the game design process and use it as a tool to flesh out a part or aspect of the game, turning the AI portion into a USP (Unique selling point), rather than the predecided mess or “AI everything”.

Firstly, I would like to talk about dialogue.

Dialogue

Dialogue is one of the core parts of games. You can have a narrative without dialogue. The game Journey is a perfect example of a game without any dialogue. Still, for most games, dialogue is core. So, what if we take the dialogue and push it further?

RPGs are a perfect place for pushing character dialogue in the future. Otome or dating sims would work well, as could detective games such as Danganronpa or Ace Attorney. I love the idea of going further within games. At the same time, the dialogue we receive as players depends on playstyles and levels of engagement. Hell, it could even depend on whether we skip through all the dialogue or hang on every line of text, almost like a random event.

But from a Dialog perspective, I want to dive into two types of games. Firstly let's talk about Poker Night at the Inventory. This was a game made in a three-month time frame, and rather than dive into the nitty-gritty of the game and its history video by Meikkon. For us here, I want to talk Dialog and set the stage and a simple one at that. You’re playing in an underground Poker game. You, the player, are facing off against Max of Sam & Max, Strong Bad of Homestar Runner, Heavy Weapons Guy of Team Fortress 2 and last but not least, Tycho of Penny Arcade Comics in a game of Texas Holdem Poker, which on the surface doesn’t sound like a lot, and at face value it’s a simple poker game with some bots which have funny lines in a relaxed environment.

But therein is what I loved and would want to see pushed a little further. I fully understand that the creators of the intellectual property don’t want their licenced character saying something.

That’s out of character.
That they didn’t agree to

But, within the creative process, pushing an AI to roleplay and interact with different characters within a poker table environment could lead to a much deeper pool of dialogue.

Due to having a deeper pool, the times when to bring up said dialogue could be tracked and attempts to reuse in a different time or even a cool-off period where you don’t use lines till X amount of time has passed.

Poker night was a game I played on and off over the years. It taught me how to play the game of poker a little better than auto-shoving each chance I could, but what kept me around and playing the game for more hours than I had to was the interactions between the charters, if it was, say, 5-8 hours of recorded dialogue for each character I would hang around in the inventory for a lot longer.

Sadly TellTale is no more. Well, they are back, but under new management and from a bit of digging, no one that worked on some of their most historic work moved to the new TellTale. I won’t say more as we’ve not seen anything of note, nor is it fair. Still, as it’s also been over ten years since Poker Night 2 came out, I think it’s safe to say that while this isn’t a game sequel, we’ll get any time soon, using AI to help flesh out dialogue for character interaction could be great. The game doesn’t need to be poker. It could be anything from board games to any game really that have NPC interactions with one another, perhaps crew members in GTA 5 recalling past events that only happened in your Heist, for example, how it’s still crazy you lived by driving via the airport as a way to escape.

An alternative thought on pushing the dialogue tree to a level it's not meant to go was in Dating Simulator games. Now I want to say I had been watching Tsundere Akuyaku Reijou Liselotte to Jikkyou no Endou-kun to Kaisetsu no Kobayashi-san last season, so there is a no zero chance that I’m stealing the idea, but what if within a dating sim, you could sometimes, not always, but sometimes ask one extra question, perhaps of your own choice.

Dating Simulators already require X, Y & Z to happen depending on the ending you're going for, and in said above anime, they're going for the perfect ending, with the idea I’m pitching here. It could be something akin to the protagonist being given a magical item by their grandparents before going along to university, now can ask one question of choice and the NPC given the information they have, the knowledge on what the player should know and perhaps a roll check or requirement check where they can learn anything.

This is linked to the idea of the games I said above, using AI to become a “Games Master” of sorts going, hey, tell more about this one thing. We’re not looking to make anything up or force something to become canon. But going that level deeper and looking to engage players in a way that’s not been done before due to technology not being there to support it, if it has been done but I’ve not seen it, please send it my way!

But for now, I must keep this train going and we’re taking a hard right into Table Top role-playing games.

TTRPGs, DND and others!

TTRPGs have blown up over the past few years, while I was always on the fringes of the world and never dived in till very late 2019 or early 2020 before IT happened and took away my ability to play with my group for the last few months. I jumped to YouTube and learned more about Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire the Masquerade and other systems and settings. The online groups of Critical Role and L.A. By Night.

But TTRPGs are deep, and if you’ve ever run a game, it can be a lot, now there are already several tools that use AI, and if anything, I want to see how TTRPGs could be on the cutting edge of things to come, as if you don’t need an engine to run everything, less is required.

AI Dungeon solo player is a text-based adventure website where you choose your own adventure, similar to those books you might have had as a kid, just without the pretty pictures. But imagine if they had an AI also make the pictures … huh. It stops theatre of the mind, which isn’t what we're here to talk about.

But imagine being able to take AI Dungeon and add your DM notes from each session. Plus, having access to history and world maps could help suggest new plots, small side quests or NPCs, which it could either directly upload onto a resource to store all NPC information.

AI can help with short and quick automation. I don’t expect people to switch to AI to make the world for them. If you want that, just buy a book. If you don’t want to, countless people have made free or cheaper ones on Patreon.

AI could be used to add that little bell of polish, your players are looking for a scrap shop, or you need to create a woodsman NPC. You could make a throw-away, but with a few clicks and one or two prompts, you could have a decent appearance + idea of how you want to flesh out this NPC who might become the party's favourite or never be seen again.

You can do this within ChatGPT, but I could see that a half-decent prompt presenting a picture or an idea of what they could look like could help make it seem like the world your players are in is more lived in. But hey, maybe an AI tool already exists?

TTRPGs are on that cutting edge, and Dungeon Alchemist is partly why. It’s an AI generate map builder which lets you build maps of different shapes and sizes. Small maps with a few rooms work best, but I’ve pushed it a lot further and as long as you have a decent computer, it will be okay.

Let me set the stage. Your players are exploring a new village and have a new side quest to run through a castle. You made it known that this isn’t an expected one. Still, the party starts planning like it’s the final boss, and you begin to panic… I don’t have a castle map ready to go. No worries. With the help of theatre of the mind and a few quick clicks, you can make and import a map into your game. Or just call for a 10-15 minute break while the players go off and start thinking about their plans. You can quickly make up a map for them to go through.

While it doesn’t add monsters and isn’t flawless, you can import with full lighting into Foundry VTT and other platforms and minimal work. You’ll have a map that looks like it took some time.

Did I sell Dungeon Alchemist? It’s just one of several maps, and it’s using AI; how everything has gone over the past six months, who knows what’s next. Dungeon Alchemist won't replace battle map artwork. Still, it lowers the entry barrier so that someone like me can present my battle map to an artist, and they can take this idea and evolve it to the next level.

Character Creation is the final part and really, I could talk for far longer, as it stands, you can go into ChatGPT and give it a bit of information and it will plop out a dnd character, and while you can ask all of the questions, you might have, it doesn’t teach you, nor does it help with every part of character creation.

I think ChatGPT could help with aspects sometimes overlooked by some players who are scared to commit something to paper, or perhaps aren’t creative with coming up with a back story or ideals, bonds & flaws. But with a ChatGPT, you could force the player to dive into each part.

ChatGPT creates a character with minimal prompt.

I fully subscribe to the thinking that many TTRPGs, DnD and Vampire are my core two. The more you put into character creation, the more you can get out. That doesn’t mean having blank parts on a character sheet is terrible, but getting to know your character away from the table is hugely beneficial, and anything you do, share it with your DM and group. I’m sure they’ll all love to hear it! Ginny Di did a great video on a character development challenge which I highly recommend with this way of thinking before you flame me!

Will we still need wikis?

Okay, well, obviously, yes, to some extent. Only some games will be able to create an internal system even with the assistance of an AI, but where I'm going with this is, over the last ten or so years, game developers created small to irrelevant game manuals. Now we don’t even have them, no PDF to download to get you to learn the game nor an in version, whether it’s a small page where the art team got to go wild. In-game tutorials are great, but they are limited in the amount they can teach.

Since Minecraft and Terraria, I have slowly observed a new phenomenon. Rather than give all of the intonations, the game designers wanted to let the players dive in and figure things out. Especially early on in the release of a game, but after 20+ updates, the game isn’t the same anymore, and a Wiki is almost mandatory to know what's happening. The game won’t tell you, and you missed all the update posts, and nothing isn’t anything in the game to help. Now the above have both made the best they can to work around this issue of information.

I can’t tell you how it’s become pretty standard practice for me when playing a game, especially one that's been out for a few years, to expect very little guidance and have a wiki ready to go. I plan on doing this when I dive into No Man's Sky.

But only some games need to be like this, and there are examples of ways to include all sorts of intonation.

However you do it, make it accessible and something your players want to use in the game.

Having access to the information you’ve collected is one of the best ways to allow players to come back to a game and get caught up. The bigger the game, the more information. But make it a joy to navigate. You want a reader to get lost within the tombs the narrative team put into. Make it so anyone can quickly and easily access the information you give them. In-game wiki, diary, webpage (looking at you, GTA 4).

The video game Norco, which you can read in my review, used Mind Map Nodes to access past information and your connection with the NPC. The significant part of this tool was that you could ask yourself questions about who you wanted information on. Still, it also helps remind you of everything you heard to know about an NPC. Linking the idea of making information a joy to use but also having depth, adding an AI to assist with this, especially when moving away from a narrative-based point-and-click game and going to the other extreme of an Elder Scrolls game.

2. Not everything needs to be said. Sometimes the things left unsaid tell us more

This isn’t anything profound, the “less is more” approach. However, you can allude and hint towards the information within your system, rather than having a wiki spell everything out along with trivia and more.

What about if it felt like the player was getting more information than they expected, bonus information for looking, or there was a mechanic involved with information collecting or depending on the genre of the game, a class perk is to acquire bonus information from conversations, history and general life. You can see how the interpretation of more information and a logging system that supports this can help users stay engaged and offer conversation points.

“Oh, I learned about X and Y at this part of the game” “Really? I didn’t know about them till later on”. RPGs lend themselves easily to this sort of system.

3. Lean into the AI aspect.

So I’ve mainly spoken about how modern game design pulls itself in all directions depending on trends and who is leading the game. But I wanted to bring it back to the AI part.

We’ve all used ChatGPT by this point, at worst, to ask it a random question that we could have googled and might have even got a better response or answer.

This makes me think if we’re saying we should move away from wikis for games and, instead, bring large parts of this information that's already part and in the game, why not make it useable and accessible within the game itself and then have an AI to help with accessing said information. You could link my thoughts on dialogue into feeding information. Still, for this, I want to talk exclusively about how an AI could be used to easily ask an NPC some information they may or may not know about and will respond as such. An example

*leaves a dungeon*

Player: “Hey, dwarf, did we enter this dungeon?”

*The dwarf looks you from head to toe and pats your head*

Dwarf “took a few blows, I see.”

DONE, that's it. If you keep asking questions, the Dwarf will get increasingly irritated to ignore you. But suppose you ask a question that makes sense for them, such as being at the event or being with you when you receive information. In that case, they can give it how they remember it happening. This is already something done within games, but having the narrative team assisted by an AI could lead to some funny and unique dialogue that most won't hear.

Keeping with the AI and information diary, having a search bar with an AI behind it rather than just a search button will either give you what you're looking for or not. It’s as black or white as that, an intelligent AI that only knows everything about this game, and what you should know will only provide the information you are privy to.

Will wikis die? Haha no.

Should they? Also no!

But not every game needs them, nor are they an excellent experience for players to be pulled out of their world to know what they need to make this thing or where X NPC is.

I hope AI is utilised and made more accessible so that small projects can benefit… let's make it so you don’t need to be connected 24/7 to use these games!

But that’s everything for now. AI and ChatGPT is an ever-evolving space. What was cutting edge a few months back is now old news. I didn’t even talk about an AI which could hold small impromptu chats and play as NPCs in open-world games. Take this video using VR where ChatGPT is responding.

The world of tomorrow is here.

As always, you can catch my full thoughts on my podcast Too Long, Just Listen, which can be found on all major podcast platforms!

Dialogue

TTRPGs, DND and others!

Will we still need wikis?

However you do it, make it accessible and something your players want to use in the game.

2. Not everything needs to be said. Sometimes the things left unsaid tell us more

3. Lean into the AI aspect.