> requirements are light
> 512 MB RAM
raised an eyebrow.
Granted I haven’t owned or used a computer with that little RAM since 2003 or so, discounting phones, but I was sort of hoping it would say 640 KB for that true DOS-era spec.
(Remember: they're system requirements, not program requirements ;)
Example:
--ROOM 22 START-- Village of Oathmoor 23,0,0,21 You find yourself in a narrow, dimly lit alley. An ELDERLY WOMAN sits perched on a broken stool, her piercing gaze fixed on you with an unsettling intensity. --ROOM 22 END-- --ROOM 23 START-- Village of Oathmoor 24,22,0,0 The road ahead begins to slope gently upward, winding its way past abandoned, barren buildings whose windows gape like empty eyes. --ROOM 23 END-- --ROOM 24 START-- Village of Oathmoor 0,23,25,0 The eerie stillness around you is oppressive, broken only by the creeping sensation of unseen eyes upon you. A chill snakes down your spine. --ROOM 24 END-- --ROOM 25 START-- Village of Oathmoor 26,0,0,24 A faint melody drifts toward you, its haunting notes carried on the breeze. The aroma of a meal cooking over a distant fire stirs both hunger and curiosity. --ROOM 25 END-- --ROOM 26 START-- Village of Oathmoor 27,25,0,0 You stumble upon a makeshift camp where people dance in defiance of their sorrows. The leader of this ragtag group locks eyes with you, their expression unreadable. --ROOM 26 END--
Not sure what the length has to do with handcraftedness though. This comment is handcrafted even if it is short.
The horseshoe theory of ai generation tells us that handcrafting and content generation extremism end up very close to each other: https://emshort.blog/2016/09/21/bowls-of-oatmeal-and-text-ge...
The fact that something is generated or hand-crafted is not interesting by itself no matter how much people try to pretend otherwise for social cohesion purposes. Mediocre thing + no AI and Mediocre thing + AI seem to be orthogonal to what people actually care about at the end of the day.
Online, almost nobody is actually going to crack open the interactions.txt file. Instead, the conversation is about the idea of it being interesting or of any special qualities, when it isn't. The thing itself is just a prop for the conversation, and you can see where anyone actually talking about the thing itself is on the margins.
When this is for a free text adventure game, it's harmless fun to hype it. But the other prong is AAA hype and AI hype, which seems like the opposite but is actually the same thing.
2) right horseshoe prong ("infinitely generated quantity is quality"): "100,000,000,000 unique planets made by one generative codebase" was the premise of Endless Space and it had a very rocky launch that took years of bespoke human work and decisions to improve the quality. Because when you're deadset on quantity being your primary quality, you also don't have time for intractable complexity or true differentiation.
And you can see the consequences play out in an adventure game like Starfield where they included infinite random planet generation, except the interactions and space of player decisions remain the exact same, so it's more like an infinite screensaver than gameplay.
On both ends, the media and discussion is aggressively channeled away from the thing itself and towards the narrative of it being something compelling and noteworthy by virtue of how it was created.
The "robot barista" at the SF airport "making" you an espresso by having a servo arm insert a kurig cup and charging you 5 bucks is extremely similar to someone charging you 50 bucks at a craft fair for a "handmade" set of earrings that look suspiciously like someone just wrapped some copper wiring they bought online around a semi-precious stone they bought online.
In one case you are "participating in a spectacle of the future" and living in an aesthetically futuristic moment while paying 500% markup to drink a shitty instant espresso, and in the other you are "participating in a spectacle of the past" and harkening back to the aesthetic of a time where we all came together as a close-knit community at our town market to support our village crafters and artists while... also paying a 500% markup for goods where real or perceptible increase in quality/value-add is often marginal.
The goods which are remarkable speak for themselves, the rest is marketing.
I went over the BAS source the last time this was posted a few weeks back and it has a lot of keywords that are specific to QB64 so unfortunately you can't run this on a true DOS machine (or DosBox).
[1] https://qb64.com
Just like machine created cutlery is essentially perfect, but human smithed cutlery will have lots of small imperfections.
And yes, they can be quite pretty.
What you see as the absolutely most beautify fork is in the eye of the beholder, of course.
Remember, the benchmark for art is a banana taped to a wall.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=45612521
But basically no. It's possible an earlier version of the game might have been backwards compatible with QBasic, but the current source is QB64-specific and thus will never work in DosBox.
To play it you'll either need a compiled Mac binary or run it in QB64.
Also, as fast as models are improving it's not a useful heuristic anyhow.
Attempting to use the legacy of actual maligned minority groups to justify your sense of outrage that people aren't interested in products you weren't interested enough in producing to actually produce is disgusting.
> Also, as fast as models are improving it's not a useful heuristic anyhow.
They aren't improving, not particularly. They finally got the video generators to kiiind ooooof maintain a character's appearance between shots. Usually.
AI is spottable, often obvious, looks cheap, lacks intent, and boring. If you actually want to create, that's great. I suggest you do what every human before you did, and invest the time and effort to learn a craft with which to do so. If you aren't interested in doing that, that's completely fine, but I am conversely uninterested in viewing whatever you are uninterested in making.
Instead of automating creativity, I suggest we automate CEOs and managers. They don't do much besides generate pages upon pages of vacuous nothing and LLM's are great at that, and they're FAR more expensive for our enterprises than graphic designers.
Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI is, nothing is stopping you from creating. People have freedom of choice in terms of what they can consume, and if AI is a better creator than you, why should you make people's experiences worse by ramming your mediocrity down their throat with the battle cry of "human made"? You don't deserve an audience just because you're made of meat.
If you hate slop, hate it because it's bad, and hate human slop equally.
For reference, I'm a published artist and I'm currently querying for a manuscript. I use AI to scaffold projects quickly to ~80% then finish it myself, just like the the masters of the Italian renaissance did with apprentices.
They can hold the MYTHS of meritocracy and victory of ideas under fair competition, because that's what they are. They are popularly held and by a majority of the country I fear, but myths they remain. You walk around the board room of any major company in the country, and you show me a meritocracy. The new rich, such as they are, were largely a product of the tech industry boom, and none of them are particularly skilled, instead what they had was LUCK. Luck to be starting companies at a particular time in history in which, if you hit the threshold of network effects and popularity, you could become an utterly unstoppable juggernaut of business, by sheer scale.
Now, that's not a NOTHING achievement, to be clear, but it is not merit by ones personal efforts. Facebook today does not exist as the monolith it does because Fuckerburg was just the rockstar of rockstar coders. He is, by most accounts, pretty mediocre in fact, and his website was built so he and the other failsons of his college class could rate the looks of their female classmates. And we know this is true, because it is not fucking possible to "hustle" hard enough to be a billionare. If you disagree, give away everything you have, start from nothing, and go prove me wrong. Go become a billionaire from zero and if you do, I will steam my Macbook and eat it in one sitting, and publish the video publicly.
And that's just NEW industry. OLD industry is stuffed to the fucking gills with the mediocre offspring of the previous generations most lucky business titans. Many of whom, for emphasis, did make solid business decisions, many of which could also be classified as evil, but that's neither here nor there. Many of our politicians similarly have storied pasts full of skeletons, from scandals to failed businesses to dead-end careers. "Failing up" is a concept because meritocracy is horseshit.
> Human vs AI is the same debate. No matter how good AI is, nothing is stopping you from creating.
I made no such claim.
> People have freedom of choice in terms of what they can consume, and if AI is a better creator than you, why should you make people's experiences worse by ramming your mediocrity down their throat with the battle cry of "human made"? You don't deserve an audience just because you're made of meat.
What on earth does this even mean? I didn't say anything about anyone else. I have said, though I do think a preponderance of people agree with me, that I am not interested in consuming things created by people who do not care about them enough to create them, and fundamentally, making stuff with AI is not creation. If you disagree with that assertion, you're free to make that case, but I advocated nothing outside of my own personal bounds of taste.
> If you hate slop, hate it because it's bad, and hate human slop equally.
Can and do!
> For reference, I'm a published artist
No you're not. And I know that because when you click through to your profile, you self identify as the CEO of a company called Sibylline Software, which is incorrect, that's Justin Crump, and you say your name is Nathan. I found info on you on your website though, but the rest of said website is nothing but corporate fluff about AI and enterprise integration and yadda yadda, very unimpressive stuff, and trying to find anything about what your company is allegedly doing or making is difficult both because you're one letter off of a MUCH larger and more successful business, and even googling for your spelling in particular brings up absolutely nothing apart from your business website and a podcast episode. And I wasn't able to find any art whatsoever.
Also you spelled your own company's name wrong in your profile. Assuming you are Nathan Rice. At this point I feel you're a highly dishonest interlocutor and I have no clue how much credibility to assign anything you say.
There is a Nathan Rice who's involved in movies? But he looks completely different to you in his photos.
> I use AI to scaffold projects quickly to ~80% then finish it myself,
As an admittedly amateur artist with a much smaller platform: I would never call 80% of ANYTHING I make a "scaffold." If AI is generating 80% of your final product, I consider that AI generated and I wouldn't be interested, and I would happily Pepsi challenge that if you're so inclined to provide samples.
Edit: Oh, no, I'm wrong, you did just spell it EXACTLY like the other Sybilline Software. Oh well I cannot possibly rewrite this comment AGAIN, this rabbit hole has sucked up so much of my time today, amusing as it is. Enjoy your AI business I'm sure you'll be partying with Bezos in like 2 years.
If you want to call out the fact that I'm published I can go scan my contract with US Games Systems, just say the word buddy.
If you ever come back to this message, I made this just with some art I've been working on over the last few days: https://imgur.com/a/Jw1Twbs Hit me back with your artistic output over the last 3 days kthxbai
And I’ve got to say, an artist signaling legitimacy by offering to scan a contract instead of sharing the art, paired with a broken link as your mic-drop moment? That’s a chef’s kiss I couldn’t script if I tried, even with AI.
Turns out Imgur has content filters that are beyond stupid, male partial nudity with man boobs and Trump & Hitler doing a drag duet is too art for virgin internet eyes.
Also, stop talking shit and show me your recent art output.
I don't think we're there quite yet, and hopefully we never will be. A tiny minority of games, maybe.
This rings false
There’s minimal if any interactivity in this “game” and I deleted it after 10 minutes of one screen with one line of text after another.
> The game is advertised as having more than 7.000 locations. In reality there are about 200 unique locations and the rest is part of a maze with exact locations.
[1] https://spectrumcomputing.co.uk/entry/6993/ZX-Spectrum/Snowb...
But big MUDs usually have "builder" teams so the comparison is unfair. However, these numbers have hardly been matched by game studios - WoW or Runescape comes to mind. And then there's Dwarf Fortress which reaches the infinite in some categories thanks to procedural generation.
[1] https://www.aarchonmud.com/arc/features
[2] https://www.mudportal.com/listings/by-genre/hack-slash/item/...
That's a first person 3D space craft simulation with a very impressive Heads Up Display with vector graphics (unfilled on BBC and C64, filled on PC). It is also a commodity trading game to improve your spaceship etc and with a massive amount of variety in a binary smaller than an empty Word doc. Also: joystick and keyboard drivers and so on.
It's quite a tale.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AI_Dungeon
Where AI has the power to shine isn't necessarily in the creation of novel stories, but in the capacity to act as a significantly more powerful and flexible text parser for player input.
Get ye flask and all that...
This is an important part of designing a text adventure that LLMs just do not care about.
Customer service AI already is a thing and it works pretty well, games are just an extension of that built upon fictional world data and dynamic events.
I think it would even be neat if you used standard dialog tree interfaces but had an LLM to slightly customize canned responses based on the player’s unique experience or reputation so far, while still communicating the relevant info, this way things feel less scripted.
Taken further the assistant's role could be expanded with greater autonomy. Games could include metadata and authors hints & directives for the narrator. Or a limited interface for manipulating the game state and shifting the traditional IF model closer to a two player collaborative game. Using the LLM to transform and extend pre-authored text might actually offer new narrative possibilities, assuming the model could do it subtly and well enough, the style, POV, mood an so on of prewritten content could be freely modified in some interesting ways. E.g introduce unreliable narrators, describe the player's actions from a point of a security camera or their dog, rewind and replay events from some other characters POV. Simulate psychological issues by subtly rewriting the player's (or the narrator's or NPCs) perception of the world and have them navigate a little twisty maze of emotional states, all different.
Restricting the model into operating strictly within the limits of human authored content could bypass some of the usual problems associated with purely AI generated games and the approach seems fitting for the genre and it's pre-existing rich tooling and talent.
Or at least, that’s how I remember it. It’s been a good 40 years though and I wouldn’t be surprised if reality was quite a bit different.
Edit: I’ve been thinking about this a bit and honestly my motivation for writing software hasn’t really changed. The users, sure, but not the motivation. It’s just thrilling to share things I built with other people.
I remember irritating the hell out of my parents (and our dog) with it until one day, by accident, I noticed they couldn’t hear the tone anymore. The frequency was somewhere in the range of 15-20 kHz IIRC.
So I wrote a “PASSWORD.BAS” source that would play that high pitched sound in short, one-tick intervals continuously while polling the keyboard for input but then stop after a random amount of time. To authenticate, the user had to hit the spacebar within a one second window of the sound’s termination. Hitting the spacebar too early would also result in access denied. Fun times!
Incidentally, if you're ever interested in playing around with one again, there's a really accurate VST emulator called Chipsynth C64 [1].
[1] https://www.plogue.com/products/chipsynth-c64.html
In the back of the manual were four BASIC programs. The first three were very simple, stuff like a loop that prints your name 10 times and then exits.
The last program balanced your checkbook. It was 4 pages long. I laboriously typed it in, hunt-and-peck style, which took hours... then I hit "run".
Nothing.
I couldn't debug it. Not only did I not really understand software, I didn't have a checkbook — hell I didn't even know what "balance your checkbook" meant.
We didn't have the exorbitantly expensive Atari floppy disk drive, nor the cassette drive, so I couldn't save my work. Still, I left that BASIC cartridge in there for several days, foregoing my games, because I didn't want to lose my investment.
Eventually, I turned off the computer and the program disappeared forever.
I didn't program again for 20 years.
I've always wondered if there is a correlation between developers and people that can enjoy tough but fair games like Super Meat Boy because of this.
I agree that resilience is important, but in my experience it emerges from a complex mix of temperament, environment, structural advantages, and mentoring, rather than being intrinsic to the individual. For illustration: I’ve trained a bunch of people from nothing on software and I always prioritized helping them find a project they cared about, because that motivation was what would power the through the inevitable frustrations.
Maybe if the Atari manual had taught me how to write a branching adventure game rather than a checkbook-balancing program, I would have stuck with programming back then. But I’m not dissatisfied with the path my life took.
The spaghetti code was astounding, and I remember squeezing line numbers between existing code-- adding a "31 GOTO 40" so I could squeeze a "room" into lines 32-39.
I never did grok the idea of building an "engine". Mostly I had PRINTs, INPUTs, and IF/GOTOs.
Looking back I wish I'd had a mentor. I think I would have accomplished so much more if I'd had somebody to offer some guidance and gentle direction.
I spent too many nights trying to implement complex text adventures in Commodore 64 Basic and I'm sure that instead of permanently damaging me (at least in the sense that Dijkstra meant) it just made me appreciate more all the abstractions later languages introduced to me.
However, we had old stacks of Compute magazine [1] lying around with BASIC source games printed out - and I remember initially being confused as to why all the line numbers were separated by intervals of 10...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compute!
And my memory might be from our Apple 2gs and AppleScript, actually (hence my caveat in the comment). But I’m sure the program was just PRINTs, INPUTs, IFs and GOTOs :)
I eventually learned to get a ProDOS disk setup, and save my work, but it was still fun.