Wrought

Inspiration

A buddy of mine mentioned playing D&D with ChatGPT. When I saw the conversation, it was just "hey lets play with this ruleset. I swing my sword with these dice values". No real calculations, no mechanical enforcement. That got me thinking: what happens if we move the calculation to dedicated rulesets, and leave the narrative for ChatGPT?

What it does

Provides ChatGPT with a reliable store and tooling for managing narrative state in response to an open-ended set of player responses.

How we built it

Entirely within codex. Prompting codex around design, features, operational deployment setup, everything.

Challenges we ran into

Identifying the crux around user interfacing. It's not architecturally straightforward to reason about the app from the perspective of the user interacting through an autonomous liaison.

Wording was another issue. Narrative, continuity, and coherence are core here. I'm a player, I want to play the game. I need information that provides me with the impulse to act. At the same time, this is a live story. I want prose. I want description. Figuring out how to prompt ChatGPT through tooling to balance these two was an exciting challenge.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

The simplicity of the interface. I believe that the entire product can be interacted with through ChatGPT and look forward to expanding beyond the fixed set of scenarios I've put together for this challenge.

What we learned

UX is difficult, and it's made moreso when another "user" is inserted between your app code and the true end-user.

What's next for Wrought

Custom worlds. ChatGPT guided world building. Mechanics editors. Stronger narrative tooling. Multiplayer. Shareable world templates.

Built With

• codex
• go
• typescript