Tia's Sailing Simulator

Inspiration

We wanted to further our knowledge of game development as well as AI, so we figured this project was a fun and challenging way to combine the two aspects.

What it does

The player captains a boat, searching the ocean for food to keep their hunger bar full. Catching different types of fish can provide different levels of sustenance, but if you take too long, the bar quickly depletes and the game ends. All the while, players can receive tidbits of information on marine life generated by our self-hosted LLM and then read through a text-to-speech service.

How we built it

The game itself was designed in Godot using the custom GDScript language. The AI portion was incorporated later on. Specifically, this was built and hosted on Modal's Cloud Computing infrastructure. The application on Modal served the client on the Godot game as the player interacted with the character on screen. The generated prompt from the Llama 3.1 8B model on Modal was then piped into Cartesia's Sonic API which converted the text to speech, playing on the game.

Challenges we ran into

One of the biggest challenges during game design was making a TileMap big enough to simulate an ocean environment, which we solved by wrapping tiles around the entire area to give the illusion of vastness. There were also struggles on the AI end. In particular, one of the biggest challenges was picking the proper model for Modal to host in order to generate relevant prompts for our game at a reliable speed, which required multiple hours of debugging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are very proud of being able to build a finished product within the time constraints, as designing a game alongside incorporating a self-hosted LLM was quite ambitious.

What we learned

We learned a lot about game design using Godot as well as the models and APIs required for efficient prompt generation. It was a lot of fun and we definitely plan on refining skills picked up during this hackathon.

What's next for Tia's Sailing Simulator

What's next is to incorporate a more intricate AI experience that delivers information regarding the game state and also expanding on the scope of the game itself.