P2: Tiny Playable Prototype (Jason — CS377G)

I made tiny prototypes of two ideas, and I will record my observations for both:

Guided by plot (previous idea about dystopia where only elites can buy cognitive-enhancement devices)

The idea for this prototype was to guide the player through a plot and story I had already written (detailed in my previous blogpost), in a parser-fiction style, and use GPT to take the character’s action and guide it along a prespecified narrative arc to a prespecified set of outcomes. I’d say it worked okay but not amazingly.

  1. The early plot points were exciting, but GPT would get into “loops” where it asks the player for too much input, slowing the progression of the game
  2. Not clear enough what the goal is. Make the player’s “goal” in a scene very clear up front, otherwise not exciting
  3. Not enough time to explain the plot — the story needs to be shorter, more like a flash fiction than a novel, because there’s only so much a player can get through.

Guided by “goals” + plot

From the above 3 observations from the playtest I decided to recraft my game around a new shorter story. The idea is that a rogue AI has taken over the world, and is now judging humans based on whether they are deemed worthy or not to live. The player is assigned the role of a human who has lived in this world, and has 1 minute to convince the AI they are worth sparing. There is a running score (starting at -5), and if the player gets enough points (earned or lost at each conversation step), they are spared and win the game.

  1. Instructions weren’t clear enough. Folks didn’t know to include short messages, otherwise they’d keep running out of time
  2. Not enough narrative immersion; hard to guide someone through a story with this setup
  3. Still very fun to roleplay a character, and the specificity + snarkiness from the custom suggestions is surprisingly delightful

Conclusion

My observations point me towards the idea that I need to come up with a) a more concise and simpler to explain plot, b) if I do use GPT to expand the number of actions a player can do, use it to “fill in the gaps” rather than drive everything, and c) seriously consider a clever technical architecture blending GPT storytelling (for its dynamicism) with my writing (for quality / retentiveness that is superior to GPT’s, for now) in a dynamic way.

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