Show HN: Asciidia – LLM-Powered Game

[levmiseri]

This is an experiment/demo that I wanted to share and see what people think.

The main premise is that you can conjure anything and the game will do its best to produce such object with all the functionality and properties that would make sense.

It might look simple at first glance, but the underlying systems are complex. Create dragons you can fly on, spells, weapons, factories, ...

[roryokane]

Cool idea for sure, but at this point, it’s more confusing than fun for a new player trying to learn the systems and goals of game.

Some people have griefed the starting area by placing turrets that kill your character when you’re in range. It makes for a confusing first 10 minutes when you wander around and aren’t sure why you’re dying. Even after that, it’s not clear to me how to interact with hostile structures, or how to tell which structure is on my team and will therefore attack me.

I tried creating a few weapons, but neither worked. I had a Short Bow equipped and Arrows in my inventory, but the Short Bow kept saying “out of ammo”. Same with a Torpedo Launcher when I had Photon Torpedoes in my inventory. When I created a plain Torpedo, I could shoot it, but it just flew off and disappeared without affecting the structure I aimed at.

There is an NPC asking for a boat, which is a cool idea for using the conjuring system, but I can’t get near him for long without dying to a griefer’s turret, so I don’t feel like trying to solve his quest.

[roryokane]

If anyone’s curious about games like this, the Scribblenauts series also has games that allow you to type the name of an object and spawn it in with game-like properties.

Scribblenauts is not LLM-based – its first game was released in 2009. The creators just spent a lot of time making a database of objects that people might ask for, their game properties, and what they look like in the game’s simple art style. Scribblenauts is also different in that it is a 2D puzzle platformer set in small levels that have their own goals, rather than a top-down MMORPG like Asciidia.

While I found the concept of Scribblenauts cool, I quickly grew bored of the puzzle levels and the shallow combat mechanics. It didn’t help that a Black Hole could solve almost any problem by destroying an obstacle. This game’s monetary cost for casting solves that, at least, though I don’t know if the economy would be a significant limitation in the long term.