Travellers Odyssey

Start of the Odyssey
Talking to NPC's
Death Screen

Inspiration

The project was inspired on the idea of the old text-based adventure genre, but with a modern twist: implementing AI to add varied characters and images to each section.

What it does

The program stores details about players, items, characters and even pronouns! With some funny easter eggs in regards to taking poos, as well as the hilarious interactable AI NPCS, the game has a funny twist or two.

The program utilises an API key to call OpenAI within the code. This was then implemented to create NPCs that you could talk to, and even attempt to barter with, in order to progress in the game.

How we built it

We split into two sections: three of us on backend (two on services, domains and controllers, and one on the AI API calls), and one of us on front-end. This structure worked for the majority of the project, although we'd all often help each other out across branches.

We created the project on Spring, utilising web services to code our design. We favoured this, because it was a framework that we were familiar with, and that is easy to get off the ground quickly with.

Challenges we ran into

Whilst we roughly planned our design and understood our goals, we didn't consider how the front and back end would meet up, which, on top of some incompatibilities with out spring build, and other misunderstandings about the general design of the backend given the context of our program, forced us to restart our project several hours in. We reused a fair chunk of the code, but ultimately wasted a lot of time.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Having a functional project, which we desired to create from the start, is of course most satisfying. However, it was the way we implemented the AI characters that you can talk to in the game that we're most proud of, as this is something completely new that we've learned and experienced. Furthermore, everyone teaming together to achieve this was a great experience, and one that we're proud of.

What we learned

Next time we'll be sure to plan ahead further; thoroughly scrutinising and evaluating our design, so that we don't run into the same problems that we had today.

We've also all gained much more experience in spring, and have now got some experience with using external web services, such as OpenAI, which have truly fascinating and very exciting capabilities.

What's next for Travellers Odyssey

Travellers Odyssey is just a small demo of what we're capable of. We'd love to further develop the ideas behind this project whenever possible (i.e. another Hackathon!), by making it so the user can type in any input they want, and the AI API helps to enable them to do an action based on this. Our goal is to give the user ultimate freedom in their modern-styled text-based adventure game, and to develop the stories behind them further.