Witch's Brew

Main idea

You are helping a witch to brew potions by "giving" her ingredients in the chat. Your skill as a witch apprentice is evaluated and if you please the witch enough, your witch rank will increase.

Inspiration

I was watching the following game dev video where one contestant made a game about throwing together ingredients to appease a witch. I thought that could make a cool scenario for the PartyRock interface.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FHary2GFFR0

Since the components are limited in their functionality I wanted to focus on using the UI to craft a pseudo-narrative experience without making the scenario too complex or tedious.

What it does

The chat window prompts the language model to engage in a teacher-student style role play where the user can prod the agent with different ingredients or phrases around the scenario of brewing witchy potions. I added another panel which evaluates the current "witch level" based on the conversation to try and inject a bit of gamification. Since I had some space left over I added a panel with a witch image to set the mood.

How we built it

PartyRock tools including chat, language generation, and image generation elements.

Challenges we ran into

The agent sometimes gets confused, thinking that it is the student. Furthermore, it seems that the safety mechanisms on the language prompting element are stricter than on the chat element, sometimes breaking the evaluation part of the experience if an "inappropriate" word pops up in the conversation.

I tried to mitigate these effects with additional prompt engineering via imposed rules.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Witch rank evaluation prompt was tricky to conceptualize but I think it works sort of well.

What we learned

I don't have much experience with prompt engineering, but find the practice to be quite trial and error based, which is okay if you have a nice hot-reloading kind of experience as the PartyRock tools give you. I could imagine such development becoming unsustainable in a more productive prompt engineering setting so I wonder how practitioners manage that at scale.

In any case, I found that it was important to have a clear concept of the reasoning or role play scenario I wanted to achieve, before starting this trial and error process; so as usual a bit of up front "design" is definitely a learning.

What's next for Witch's Brew

It would be cool to make the experience more interactive / accumulative in the sense that what the user does has a more lasting effect on the role play world. I originally had the idea that another element would track the number of potions brewed or keep a portfolio of successful recipes, but I could not get this working right

Built With

• partyrock