Forsaken Foliage of Farandaya

Inspiration

For almost 20 years now, I've wanted to make a fantasy setting around 16th century SEA. There's pirates, magic, a variety of religions and cultures, colonists, some oriental empires, primitive firearms. And the jungle makes for a good dungeon in itself. It's just a great theme, underutilized, but also underdocumented in history, so it's hard to get books and inspiration. GPT-4 is great because it does know the regional history inside out and is creative enough to adapt it.

Also I love RPGs, but the genre has become about stat optimization, builds, and wikis. I wanted to bring the RP back into RPG.

What it does

It's a RPG, but designed to be more forgiving on suboptimal builds, and interactive with whatever the user wants to be. It's also designed to toss a few surprises in every now and then.

How we built it

We're basically running a RPG engine here to handle plot and conflict resolution, with GPT used as a "renderer".

GPT is also very creative, more than a human, and can generate some good ideas. The first encounter iterates between designing a creature that fits the background and generating the stats for it.

Challenges we ran into

AI games so far only use very basic state management, not enough for conflict resolution. D&D can be too rigid and not very interesting, so we built this on top the FATE Accelerated system and prototyped the conflict resolution system in a day.

The other challenge is wanting to do something horror themed and combat scenes. GPT-3.5 and GPT-4 often reject anything close to horror and violence, so we had to engineer the prompts around that.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Probably invented a new genre in 2 days :)

What we learned

So interactive gaming does work, and the tech is just right for it - not too expensive, high quality enough to be entertaining. I hope it inspires more ideas on what the tech can do, and what Voiceflow could do.

Voiceflow is cool and fast to work with too. Downside is the speed and difficulty of debugging this style of code, but I'm still new. We do have to figure out architecture as well, as a lot of the current code is quite spaghetti and redundant. There seems to be potential for a CMS style of writing adventures.

What's next for Forsaken Foliage of Farandaya

More content! The original plan was 5 events, but unfortunately after spending a day on the engine, there was only one day to fix bugs and add content.

Procedurally generated content! This was part of the original plan, very doable, but it was very time consuming to debug and probably would have lost points. The character creation was a good example too.

More flexibility. Most of the choices used buttons to prevent prompt injections, and partly to guide the player on their options. But flexible choices should be possible and give more agency.

It's possible that Voiceflow would support a CMS and this could allow other content creators to make their own adventures too.

Built With

• gpt
• javascript
• voiceflow