I love all aspects of Game Design, from conceptualization to design to creation to the final playtesting. So I decided to challenge myself and ChatGPT. AI is becoming more prominent in our everyday lives whether you notice it or not and although it's still in its infancy, it can do some impressive things.
I decided I wanted it to make a card game, a challenging and complex task but one I was confident would work. I wanted to have the AI fully create the game without any input, creative or otherwise, from me. I like challenging AI because I know it can do a lot more than it says it can. Using keywords like "example" can have the AI generate mock-ups or select choices from a list.
I started off my journey with a prompt that provided my only input into the game, "You are an experienced game developer and I will work with you to create a new card game similar to pokemon". This context provides the AI with the attitude and structure it needs to answer questions appropriately. It also gave the AI the concept of "our game" which allowed me to keep things such as creature types and mechanics persistently defined throughout the conversation.
I then hashed out the mechanics which turned out to be creatures, spells and locations. Locations generate resources each turn and those resources can be used to summon creatures and play spells by spending resources of the same type. Creatures have primary types, elemental subtypes, attack, defense, cost and special abilities.
I then determined the dimensions, HTML notation color codes, and layout of the card including font type and size as well as component separation methods which it would show me using HTML/VBcode/Unity2D snippets. I also had it generate descriptions for the icons and creatures that I used in DreamStudio to generate the images/icons.
I then generated a creature for each of the type/subtype combinations, alongside a spell and enchantment(persistent spell) for each type. Sometimes it would pull in random keywords from Magic The Gathering which I would then ask it to define in the bounds of our game. I did have to have it rewrite a couple abilities that did not make sense with the mechanics defined for our game, but other than that I ended up with a solid library of cards.
I then went into Gimp 2 to create the card templates utilizing the dimensions defined by the AI. Anytime I had to make a decision for how something was sized/positioned/styled, I turned back to the AI to answer the questions. Finally, It named the game (Elemental Conquest) and wrote an HTML page for the game with the rules and creature/card types and added a separate page to show a compendium of the cards.
Overall it was a fascinating process that helped me learn more about how ChatGPT works and I ended up with maybe not the most balanced/fun card game but definitely one that can be functionally played and is 100% fully generated by AI.