Unleash your "pawer" in Animal Nation
In Animal Nation, you're running for president of a nation of dogs, cats and other animals. Give speeches, win votes, and tackle gender equality issues in this fun, AI-driven election simulator game. Prove your "pawer" by winning the election!
Inspiration
One of the key challenges in achieving gender equality is ensuring the economic and political participation of all genders. Cultural and social norms often prevent those from underprivileged backgrounds from voicing their opinions on these crucial matters.
Animal Nation is an election campaign simulator that takes players on a virtual journey of running for president in a nation of animals. Players will have the opportunity to voice their opinions on key topics that widely affect women worldwide. The game evaluates players’ speeches, allowing animal citizens to cast their votes based on the strength and content of the player’s input, a kind of gameplay only recently made possible through Generative AI.
What it does
Animal Nation is an election campaign simulator. In Animal Nation, you’re a presidential candidate competing to lead a nation of animal citizens. Rally support with persuasive speeches to win over a diverse electorate. Driven by AI, each animal casts their vote based on what you say—and how you say it. Can you secure victory and become the next leader of Animal Nation?
Designed to address gender equity challenges around the world, as outlined in UN Sustainable Development Goal 5, the game centres on issues primarily affecting women. It also provides players with an opportunity to engage with and form their own opinions on political matters.
How we built it
We built the game in Unity and integrated it with the Gemini API through HTTP endpoints. We also used other Google services such as Spreadsheets API.
The core use of Gemini is to evaluate players' speeches. To reflect the diverse demographics of Animal Nation, we created seven different personas, each representing a distinct group of residents in Animal Nation, such as cats, dogs, rabbits, and more. Each persona has a unique personality, preferences, and concerns.
To simulate the voting tendencies of each persona, we designed a scoring system based on several criteria: Relevance to the topic, Benefit to the voter, Ideological Compatibility, Relatability, Appeal, and Viability. The higher the player’s score in these areas, the more likely they are to win votes from that specific persona.
This scoring system adds a layer of strategic depth, requiring players to tailor their speeches to resonate with the needs and values of Animal Nation’s residents.
The gameplay of Animal Nation leverages the power of Generative AI, making gameplay possible in ways that traditional techniques could not achieve.
Challenges we ran into
The evaluation of players' speeches is currently made possible through the use of Large Language Models, specifically Gemini. Initially, we attempted to use Small Language Models (SLMs) to process speeches locally. However, integrating SLMs into Unity builds presented challenges, and the quality of natural language understanding was also a concern when using these models. Consequently, we turned to Gemini to provide more accurate and effective speech evaluation.
Accomplishments that we're proud of
Although the game still needs polishing, we are proud to see the original gameplay we envisioned was made possible with the use of Generative AI. Traditional techniques could not have achieved this.
What we learned
Integrating the Gemini API into Unity is seamless, and the API itself is user-friendly and easy to work with.
What's next for Animal Nation
We will test the game and gather feedback from friends and our community. We plan to keep developing it and potentially take it to other game jams in the future.
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