Welcome to Blaugust 2022: 31 game ideas from AI

So for this Blaugust, I’m going to do something different. I’m not going to write most of the posts. I’m not going to take screenshots. I’m not going to do much at all. I’m just going to sit back and watch what happens as Artificial Intelligence takes over Chasing Dings!

My goal here is pragmatic. I want to write a program that will take a blog post (that I do write), and do a lot of the busy work that I have to do after each post, for me. I want it to write a snappy headline, decide what image to put on the top of the post, determine categories and tags, and maybe a little summary of the post for the “Excerpt” box.

I don’t want to write all that!

I’ve brought together a bunch of AI tools. I have Open AI’s “GPT-3″. This text AI takes a prompt (for instance, a blog article) and tries to continue it in a natural way. If you leave a sentence unfinished, it will try to complete it and add whatever else it thinks would be appropriate. If you leave things all buttoned up, but ask a question at the top (such as, What Google Trends categories would be best for this article?”), it will return those things.

Also in my toolkit are three AI programs that generate art. “Craiyon”, previously known as Dall-E Mini, takes a prompt and does a pretty decent job of returning art that matches that prompt. It’s fast and free. “Midjourney” is a Discord bot that generates art, also via prompts — and it’s collaborative, as every other user can see and comment and even make variations of what you create. It marks art with striking drama and symmetry. Finally, “Dall-E 2” has gotten a lot of press for making creations that looks as if they were designed and painted by a human.

I’ve been experimenting with all these tools for the past week. And I asked GPT-3 to give me 31 new game ideas, one for each day of Blaugust, inspired by the day of the month.

To do that, I first gave it a series of prompts of what I wanted to see from it:

Number: 102. Genre: City-builder. Title: “The Year 102 BC: The Fall of Atlantis”. Outline: In this videogame, you follow the journey of a Roman explorer who, while adrift at sea, discovers the lost continent of Atlantis, just before it sinks beneath the waves forever. 

Number: 52. Genre: Simulation/racing game. Title: “52 Pick-up”. Outline: You discover an old 1952 Ford pickup truck in a salvage yard and restore it to pristine beauty. Once complete, the game allows you to race your ’52 pickup at the local drag strip against other classic cars. 

Number: 37. Genre: Isometric tactical strategy game. Title: “The Mighty 37”. Outline: In this isometric tactical strategy game, you play as one of the 37 students of Monterey Elementary School’s fourth grade class, who must fight off an invasion of aliens that only they can see. 

And then I’d write:

Number: 1.

And wait for it to fill in the rest.

Number: 1. Genre: First-person shooter. Title: “Number One”. Outline: In this first-person shooter, you play as a secret agent who must track down and stop a madman who is bent on world domination.

Number: 1. Genre: First-person shooter. Title: “The One”. Outline: In this first-person shooter, you play as a soldier who is the only one left alive after an alien invasion. You must fight your way through hordes of aliens to find a way off the planet.

Number: 1. Genre: Romance Visual Novel. Title: “The One”. Outline: You play as a young woman who, after moving to a new city, falls in love with a man she meets on the subway. However, you soon discover that he is already in a relationship. Can you win his heart?

Number: 1. Genre: Supernatural Horror. Title: “The Number 1”. Outline: On the night of your 18th birthday, you awake to find that you are now the Number 1, the most powerful being in the supernatural world. With this newfound power comes great responsibility, as you must now protect the world from evil forces that seek to destroy it.

I would do that several times until I found one that I liked and that wasn’t also the title or plot to an existing game. A lot of times they were. Sometimes I’d go so far as to offer a genre, or a title idea, just to knock it off a kick for games that were already based off a number — 11th Hour, 7th Guest, 24, etc. It would really get fixated on those.

With an outline in hand, I’d just keep asking it to expand on that outline, occasionally adding some connecting words, sometimes section headings, until I had enough for a post. And then I’d put that post through the wringer, generating all the images and metadata with the other AI tools.

So, welcome to 31 days from the minds of artificial intelligences. Not gonna lie, some of these games are games I would like to play.