Impossible
Overview
My latest project is a bit of a John Henry challenge, where I play both parts. It is a single puzzle room with two versions. One was written by me, the other written on the fly by the Inworld ChatGPT based text generator. The level is small but the puzzle is difficult, the exact sort of situation where a player might get stuck for long enough to exhaust the available dialog. For the written version I used elements which subtly change as you interact with the room, giving some small level of progression. For the chat bot version I let the improv skills of the bot riff on the events it observed. The Inworld character was not a complete plug and play element though. I had to create an original character, define it’s conversational style, write example dialog, and create a gameplay system which prompted the chat bot by describing the activities of the player.
Why am I here?
At GDC 23 I was introduced to the Inworld ChatGPT based dialog generator. I was interested in seeing if I could plug it into some level I’d already developed in order to see what kind of lines it would come up with. I had an old puzzle game I’d created for a 7 day design challenge which was heavy on dialog (for such a short demo) which seemed like the perfect use case. The original level used some proprietary assets, so it never made it onto this portfolio. But this, along with the Ultimate FPS Puzzle Kit being free on the Unreal Marketplace for a brief window, gave me the push to resurrect it. Unfortunately, I quickly found out that between scrubbing out the old proprietary elements, and implementing all the new elements I was interested in, I would have to essentially rebuild the demo from scratch. So I did.