Game development log #4

Zephyros day 5 - Contents and game play!

Onboarding with AI! Time to generate content! And we need A LOT of it!

I have to say... I thought that working on game development was difficult, which it indeed is, but when it comes to content creation... OMG... especially considering the amount you need just to start...

Having a significant part of the game lore already written (shared with supporters / Patreons, in case you like to join),I decided to get some help from the new kid on the block (yeah, AI is still new to me).

I had a subscription to ChatGPT4, so I've tried to use it for everything.

The first thing I had to do was to clean up the story and fill in the gaps. Got some heroes, enemies, and a good plot to create the story of the game world. For this, the AI made everything look like a piece of cake.

Then I had to dig a bit more on the specifics, and the prompts I've used got me the following:

- Descriptions for each race in the game (I've already added some contents on the web: https://www.zephyros-online.com/game/player-guides).

- Class-paths for each race and their labes at each level. This was pretty cool becuase I've got it in JSON format that I can easily transform later in queries to be saved in the database.

- Then I generated random monster names according to each area of the game-world (the world will be divided in 5 zones). This was the one that took the longest time to generate since I've asked for 3 names per area and monster type (having 3 types, low level, medium level and boss monsters).

- At this point, I've started to think about the players levels, experience, and how much each monster should give according to their level. Soon I've realized it was not possible for the AI to generate all the data at once and asking for specific batches of data wouldn't be the best neither, here was when the AI gave me a tip I didn't though about AT ALL: create a script to generate the data locally.
This was probably the best way to get the 110% from the AI, which is better at generating small scripts to create data than generating the data itself.
Took me about an hour to generate scripts and got (to be tested), a balanced players required experice per level (from level 0 to 100), the monsters drop experience and their attributes increments (every 5 levels).

- Obviously contents are not only this data... I still needed the maps... and this was the cherry on top...

I ended up immersed in this task, battling between the AI and my own code, spending about 30 hours of work over the past week or so.

I have to say: I'm in love with the results! - but I'm not in love with the current script. I have the feeling it's so badly coded, I probably couldn't do it worse (if you've seen the Jack Sparrow meme), BUT it works.

Over the next few days, I will try to clean it up, add a few more features to include animations and other ground variations, also adding rivers, and my idea is to publish it as a new package available on NPM.

It's fully independent from Reldens, but I will introduce it as part of the admin so administrators will be able to automatically generate new areas just by defining some parameters and uploading the element files (tilesheet files and JSON files for each element).

Hope you like it!