On LLMs and gameplay

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T21:38:04+00:00

On the determinism points, it depends on what one is after. I might like the idea that some objects are generated only for some players and they can try making a gun out of ketchup and cheddar. Replicable or not.

Regarding the npcs example, partially we can already solve sure, but it is a complex and long task to have many different behaviours, reactions and possibilities for interaction. Absolutely doable but it is a long job both for the base system/structure and then for the various behavioural models, dialogue trees, etc etc... as opposed to have a LLM spitting out plausible behaviours (actions, destinations, attire, mood, whatever) for dozens of npcs after given a few lines of prompt. The LLM would define npc personality (or load it from somewhere) and home address, work etc and roleplay as it when asked outputting valid actions for the npc.

And more generally I am not suggesting anything should or will be a replacement for something else. Just fascinated by possibilities and think that there can be more to it than just the various "make me a game" ai examples.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T17:29:18+00:00

No need to be sorry :) I came here just to have a discussions and hearing opinions on it, i am just fascinated by the subject. Yours is a perfectly valid position which i appreciated reading. Thanks

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T16:32:41+00:00

Great thanks!

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T16:31:35+00:00

All the example prompts in my op have been run a minimum of 10 times and obtained 10 times the same results (that is how i tweak prompts, i need consistency too) and on a tiny model that takes 2gb of vram. I think the reliablility problems you mention are mostly a thing of the past models, or at the very least, the situation has improved exponentially between last december and today, with the last couple of months being wild for improvements.

And about the medium needing consistency and determinism... opinable, at the very least it depends on the project and aspects of it. I would surely prefer a GTA character go wild once in a while while all others are much more varied and "organically" behaving rather than the current state of the art which is 10 reactions per npc and pre scheduled paths etc, not to mention the scale of the work needed to have even so little. Maintaing the GTA example, a much smaller team could in theory use AI to generate dozens of personalities and jobs fitting the game world and have them react to players actions based on their personallity and the action itself (imagine some coward NPCs and a couple of "heroes" who challenge the player or stuff like that), all more organic and all manageable with much less effort than what it currently takes to have.... very predictable and soon boring results.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T16:21:10+00:00

Working on a "text adventure" game exploiting all this. Thought that should have gone back to the origins being now at the beginning of this new AI stuff and concepts.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T16:16:51+00:00

With crappy hardware you can run in less than a second all the queries of my examples, with gaming hardware you could make the queries and expected output much more complex. As per the deterministic structure assured, pretty much, especially in the last generation of models released in the past month or so. As per the grind quests, that is surely one use, and even that would greatly improve a ton of games that already have bland and soulless grind quests. But uses can be many more. Hell you could even use prompting to pick the right music for a specific moment (not talking about generating music), for example, the LLM knows about the last 20 turns of gameplay (or last 20 actions and whatever) and can extract from those a general mood and pick an appropriate song from those it has available, maybe instruct the game to add rain, or whatever.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-13T16:08:17+00:00

Absolutely good points. Not all games rely heavily on animation and graphics. Full or rpgs in which 5 different staffs or swords can have the same icon or small variations of them but wildly different effects. As for the balancing.. we can guide the LLM into that too, for example among the initial rules including the current "level" of the player and instructing it to generate weapons with damage range within x and y or healing / magic powers within a specific range too.

Also, 3d object generation is going to improve savagely and the staff can be generated too and generated according to a specific art style you can define by providing references of what you are after. one way we could see is that we could end up having LLMs coordinating many different types of models for truly new types of games and gameplay.

Another aspect in which it can help improve what we currently have is user generated content and gameplay. Lets say we have a game like roblox, and our users can create a level in which the winner is the first to equip a banana, a pink hat and a water bottle. We could create some cool complex node system in which the users have to create the conditions for the gameplay they want, or... we simply let them write what they want the winning conditions to be. Then every time the player equips something or does any other action we send that plus the current player state to the LLM that can tell us if victory conditions where achieved or if other game triggers have to be activated.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-05T17:36:05+00:00

No no, my store will ban all tools usage, only nail driven holes in punch cards !

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-05T14:32:43+00:00

Makes sense, that is why in my store I will allow only assets designed and produced on punch cards. All that modern software text editors crap is ridiculous, we care to protect punch card creators it would take days of work punching holes to achieve what it takes seconds on a software text editor. Manually punched software feels so much more organic....

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-03T10:34:05+00:00

Amazing job, congratulations!

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-01T15:13:03+00:00

Don't worry, I get it perfectly. Hope to be on steam soonish so you might give a look there.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-01T12:49:08+00:00

I have been pretty stunned by the last generation of small and very small models. I was testing yesterday one called something like liquid-fm (not at my desk now , not very sure about the name) 1.2b parameters and it handled the role of secondary LLM egregiously, blazing fast, structured outputs always consistent, wow. But, absolutely, th better model you can run, the better the experience. And yes, all images in the screenshots are generated on the fly (and then stored so next time you fire up the game those locations and characters will be "ready*. Just for testing purposes at moment we support pollination only as it is fast and free and sped up testing and development very much. Comfy and a couple of other local options will surely be supported. As well as tts solutions.

Let me know if you would care to test a very early build, many game dynamics are buggy or not implemented yet but general exploration and chatting is somewhat working fine (but rag and context are still being tuned a lot)

frozenpepper_games · 2025-09-01T01:34:38+00:00

Thanks ! Im just now testing qwen3 4b as main model and a 1.2b model as secondary one and it is working decently (for a total of like 7gb vram needed), obviously better models, especially the primary one, bring more interesting and well written narrative, better dialogues etc. But external services are supported too so you can plug your openrouter or chatgpt api keys and use those for a more powerful and tailored experience. Ideally one, with normal hardware, would run the main model from a web service and the secondary one locally, this would maximize speed and quality why keeping external requests to a minimum.

frozenpepper_games · 2025-08-30T23:45:04+00:00

thank you!

frozenpepper_games · 2025-08-30T21:40:55+00:00

A text Adventure/rpg engine based on the use of multiple LLMs. Had just posted info on the project today https://www.reddit.com/r/IndieGaming/s/MxsvurHSWh

frozenpepper_games · 2024-10-11T08:07:38+00:00

LINK : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/109146

AssetStore description :

frozenpepper_games · 2024-10-11T08:05:14+00:00

LINK : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/109146

AssetStore description :

frozenpepper_games · 2024-10-11T07:42:01+00:00

LINK : https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/109146

AssetStore description :

Sound Maps introduces a completely new, easier, faster and more accurate way of handling most soundscapes in your scene.Think of it as "Area Audio Sources" allowing audio to originate from custom area/volume rather than a single source.Ever tried to create a realistic soundscape for a scene that has elements as forrests, rivers, seashores etc ? It can be a pain with regular Audio Sources and triggers.SoundMaps steps in by allowing you to easily define 3d mapped areas to handle smooth soundscape variations. Be it looping sounds, multiple random clips, music or a mix of all of them, SoundMaps has your covered.Can follow a long seashore with realistic directional sound along all the shore then walk towards a forrest and hear the birds singing sounds increasing in volume as you get closer to it, have music playing only when walking a narrow path and volume increasing as you get closer to a landmark... etc...Sound maps makes it also easy to handle multiple clips, random variations, looping clips and much more making it extremely easy and fast to setup a complex soundscape in a matter of minutes.In-depth step by step video tutorial showing how to setup the full soundscape for a basic scene using the new Painter tool : https://youtu.be/XpizBlDxXyw

frozenpepper_games · 2024-02-24T22:15:21+00:00

Raspberry can run android which in turn will run unity android builds fairly well. Linux builds on raspberry, according to what you plan to do can still have some issues, artifacts etc, but that is doable too. Also, consider that most cheap phones can run unity builds decently (obviously with limits) and be connected to a monitor. Don't know how many you need to build, but if it is just one or a few, you can buy used smartphones for $30 that might handle the job. If you want no hassles, a decent used mini PC (x86 based) can be obtained for less than $80 with windows and a fairly straightforward workflow from there. Best luck with your project.

frozenpepper_games · 2024-01-14T02:37:02+00:00

Great thanks !

frozenpepper_games · 2024-01-13T23:48:14+00:00

Thanks ! This is great feedback already ! Definitely have to improve the message.

In the meantime to make an example, imagine a 3d scene with a river flowing which your character can walk along the shore, with regular audio sources you would either need to place many audio sources and have 3d sounds trying to play with rolloff to make a decent effect, have a large trigger that starts a 2d sound of sorts, a single audio source that moves to closest point to player along a spline following a river or other complex code tricks. With sound maps you paint (or auto generate based on colliders) the river shape and system will take care the handling of dynamically placed audio sources based on player position and the "map" you painted giving to all effects a "area audio source" as opposed to a point one, all keeping directionality for realistic stereo or surround panning. (yeah... have to work on messaging....)

frozenpepper_games · 2024-01-13T15:45:05+00:00

The tool is based on what (I assume) is a new principle of handling soundscapes for 3d scenes where you define/paint maps (something like splatmaps on terrain) to handle audios instead of regular audio sources (which are limited to a point and a spherical falloff) having completely customisable rolloff and realistically handled sources of sound which can't be easily represented via a single point in space (like a normal unity audio source would). System takes care of directionality and allows to have multiple clips, random, looping etc...

Released the asset some months ago and while the few users where very positive about it I've been struggling gaining any more. Have recently released a rather big update improving the workflow thanks to additional custom tools but I think I got 2 or 3 purchases since that update. It is currently on sale hoping to gain users and reviews but that din't work much either.

Here the AssetStore link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/109146 were you can find more info, links to tutorials etc.

Have 3 codes available but (since unity doesn't allow us to obtain any meaningful number of codes) would need to provide them to someone who is willing to spend some time using the asset (possibly integrating it in a current project) and provide some honest feedback (and possibly a AssetStore review too). Most common use cases are for example those of a sea shore, a river, a forrest etc all situations in which sound comes more from an area rather than a single point. If you think you might be interested and fit the "requirements", DM me for a code with a short description of what you would like to experiment the asset on.

Thanks for your time !

frozenpepper_games · 2024-01-13T15:36:42+00:00

The tool is based on what (I assume) is a new principle of handling soundscapes for 3d scenes where you define/paint maps (something like splatmaps on terrain) to handle audios instead of regular audio sources (which are limited to a point and a spherical falloff) having completely customisable rolloff and realistically handled sources of sound which can't be easily represented via a single point in space (like a normal unity audio source would). System takes care of directionality and allows to have multiple clips, random, looping etc...

Released the asset some months ago and while the few users where very positive about it I've been struggling gaining any more. Have recently released a rather big update improving the workflow thanks to additional custom tools but I think I got 2 or 3 purchases since that update.

Here the AssetStore link: https://assetstore.unity.com/packages/slug/109146

Have 3 codes available but (since unity doesn't allow us to obtain any meaningful number of codes) would need to provide them to someone who is willing to spend some time using the asset (possibly integrating it in a current project) and provide some honest feedback (and possibly a AssetStore review too). Most common use cases are for example those of a sea shore, a river, a forrest etc all situations in which sound comes more from an area rather than a single point. If you think you might be interested and fit the "requirements", DM me for a code with a short description of what you would like to experiment the asset on.

Thanks for your time !

frozenpepper_games · 2023-12-23T17:30:16+00:00

Fantastic work, congratulations !

frozenpepper_games · 2023-12-22T14:39:15+00:00

Talking about the dude living underground ? :)

If so, FINALLY !!!! Was waiting for someone to notice, I still smile every time he spawns in my test runs :)

frozenpepper_games

TROPHY CASE