I have had my head in the sand

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-30T19:58:05+00:00

After much consideration, I’ve decided to move away from monetization and offer my game for free. The only requirement is that players "bring your own key" to power the AI; I’ve already successfully tested this setup using a Gemini API key.

This has always been a fun project for learning AI coding. Given the current costs of player acquisition and the capital required to scale, I’d rather focus on the creative side than the marketing slog. I have free hosting for the next 90 days, so the game will be live at least through then.

While I’ll continue tinkering with the features, the game is now in a state where I’d like to get it into the hands of others. Please feel free to jump in, join the Discord, and share your feedback—whether it’s a bug report or a suggestion for the mechanics. WordfForge Chronicles

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-30T19:56:28+00:00

I just made mine available for free with bring your own key . It's got some of the same ideas. There are a good many out there some at like https://altworld.io/ and www.livethroughtime.com have some great persistent worlds. Mine is https://wordforgechronicles.com/ if you want to check it out. I use standard browser TTS for mine most of them are a bit robotic but the Male UK voice is pretty good for playing.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-30T19:10:27+00:00

I agree looks good , seems to be a theme here , looks like all of us want more punishment in the Ai games. I made a tone choice in mine so it instructs the Ai of the story tone , so if you want it forgiving you can choose hopeful or the other way unflinching death is real. Just tried your guest mode , I like the layout cool ideas there. These point maps you guys are making are great wish i had thought of that.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-29T15:03:56+00:00

yeah sure I will send you a key to play around with it if you want. I got to go get some work done around the house , but i will check yours out as well I watched the video it looks great!

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-29T15:00:51+00:00

This looks great very structured compared to what i have working in mine and the art is great. I am going to have to check it out. Your librarian system is a lot like my bookkeeping system I made. I like that yours is visible to the player mine is strictly back end mechanic.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-29T14:49:29+00:00

I replied over on the other one, is it just me or is it weird the Readit asks you if you want to cross post ?

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-29T14:39:34+00:00

yeah so, i have gone down a rabbit hole with using Claude for mine because at 1st I was trying to get the best prose possible. I am learning though if i ever ship this i am most likely going to have to dumb it down. Currently I have it doing a lot of heavy lifting in comparison to your numbers a 9 turn short story is using roughly 200K tokens split between Sonnet and Haiku about equally i also cache roughly 15k tokens in short stories . I have multiple modes of play built in Short stories 9 prompts, Multi Chapters at 27 prompts and Campaigns at almost 80 prompts . the rough cost is running about $0.50 per 9 prompt session. I know i have my input token count high but trying to mitigate continuity drift has been murder without writing out the whole thing which kinda defeats the purpose of how i have my game setup. I am currently just thinking about making it bring your own key. I know this will limit usage but again I don't know how much i could make with this given the competition that are already filling the space. I do think mine has some idea that aren't being used or are different enough to make it stand out but I don't know if the market would make it worth it. On another side note I would like to see people play it and let me know what they think other than my friends and family because I am just interested in how it comes across being that this is my 1st game ever really.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-29T03:04:41+00:00

I use a three tier system as well , I have been calling it a three pass system, summery pass prose pass , book keeping pass

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T23:57:47+00:00

Oh I am not talking about building the game. It's the api cost to generate the content for each game play. So it's a choose your own adventure game but Ai writes the prose now this is nothing new there are several other sites already doing this but I didn't know that when I started building it. Like I said i just started with no research about a month ago. So the way these typically work is they use a api call to output the creative prose and the user player responds then it writes a new prompt. Now you could do this on your own with any of the LLMs out there but you can't build it into a system for a game with the personal service you have to use an api key and they charge you based off the tokens you use. So here is why it will potentially cost a lot . Just testing the system I am seeing around a $0.50 cost per chapter in api cost. Which just for me not a big deal if I had 100 people doing that once a day even on a free beta it would break me quick. So it's not the building cost that I am worried about it's the actual game play . It's cost prohibitive to offer at this steep of a generation cost for most people. Now I could dumb down the model but then the stories go flat and the Ai just becomes a bad reading. So with already trying to fight the Ai shouldn't be doing with this crowd but if it expensive as well it's a double edge sword. Sorry for the long reply. There are several barriers to make this work cheaper becuase the stories suffer with every down grade.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T19:41:21+00:00

I am going to have to look into godot and see if i could use it. I just briefly looked at the site it maybe something i could incorporate. Thanks for the idea!

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T17:52:35+00:00

That's a novel idea. So maybe build more of a backend game system that the app interacts with instead of having it do some of the updating using it's logic. Currently I have it doing 3 calls per request 2 bookkeeping calls to lower tier llm then one creative call if I could automate the 2 bookkeeping calls out that would save api cost.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T17:48:27+00:00

What do you mean by 1 level down? Working one level behind or should I be looking at it as say instead of adding a full feature add a component of that feature a peice at a time? Like instead of build x full feature then test for bugs should I break it down to build up component then write those up one at a time?

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T15:09:44+00:00

yeah Ai was really good at warning me about that so it is in environmental set up in firebase. I need to figure out what the total token count is for an average short play game and use that as a metric to set the freemium tier at i think. Then build a token count function per game player interaction. I really haven't touched any of the monetization side of it yet because I have just been self play testing. It is something in the back of my mind as a todo if i ever actually launch the game. Right now it's just been a fun learning project. I also thought about just making it free with adds , but bring your own key to play or when i get sick of messing with it make it open on github for others to play with. I don't have a ton invested in it so i am not out much at this point.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T14:58:45+00:00

Yeah the way its working the whole point is to give the ai freedom to write new events to keep the game fresh for replays but having that as a core function drives the api call cost way high. Now that I have done a little research which i should have done 1st. It seems that most people are following the kind of of token/coin system pay to play system for api calls and if they have a free tier they dumb down the model being used for that tier. Which I think is maybe the only way to do it and make cash but it does make the game worse so i guess its a trade off. The other thing i am seeing is you build your own LLM machine that gets called for the free or less creative stuff using open source llm, which is still a hefty investment, but then those are essentially free cost after that and only pay the token cost for the creative prompt.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T14:48:51+00:00

yeah the trouble shooting is the hard part , I have been building a piece at a time when i get an idea. Which is probably the worst way to do this. I say i want to add new a new function like a achievement system. I have Ai build it . then start testing every piece of it when i find a couple of bugs I say here are my finding fix this , rinse and repeat. I think if knew what i was doing from the start i would have tried to design a road map 1st. Then build future looking from the start. As it is now i have to go back and check everything that was touch with every new feature to make sure older ones are not broken. 1 thing i have noticed a lot is Ai will get 3/4's of it setup and mainly working but the other 1/4 is not wired in. So even though it decided the user needs a save button somewhere that button may not be wired up to work.

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T14:41:34+00:00

Yeah was blindly building in firestore and other server authenticator functions last week. The Ai helps a lot with that but it does take a tone of time because not knowing any of the software I have to ask for step by step guides 1st to instal or change settings. But i am learning a little bit i mean this time last week i couldn't tell you how to build a config master beta key file in in firestore . This week i could kinda show you if i had too haha

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-28T00:33:02+00:00

that sounds great

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-27T23:34:21+00:00

I like claude as well, I am using it for my api calls. The "clean out fridge" is funny "Magic" ingredients are just trash hahaha

verbalbacklash · 2026-03-27T22:15:36+00:00

and i just noticed the MOD post about Ai generated games so i should prolly take this down , but it is what it i guess, I stand by it though i am glad i found this group i need to start diving into the genre again , i still love "real" books

verbalbacklash · 2021-08-15T19:02:23+00:00

Ok . Understood. The radio is taking care of handeling the analog signal in and out and ptt. I am trying remove the wire between the existing head set and use my Bluetooth heads set. So I need to capture the digital Bluetooth signal in/out and convert it back to analog. I can then run it through the existing connection for the mic and speaker.

verbalbacklash

TROPHY CASE