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Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

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Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#51

Post by ldoughty »

Farida-Rosebud wrote: post #37
EwanG wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So it sounds like I should "keep an eye" on this space and hopefully at some time in the future give this a try. Do you have any VN examples currently just to see where it's at?

We have one game in progress by one of our beta testers that has some VN vibes/elements: https://play.rosebud.ai/games/91d54c96-378d-4c64-b71b-4841fc... Here you chat with this grandma, make here drink coffee inside and go outside (she'll comment on both of the actions a bit haha).

Would Rosebud help in making consistent characters?

I tested out that example game. I asked her "do you like coffee", and Grandma replied "I despite coffee...". However, when you say "lets drink coffee" she says "Oh, absolutely! Let's drink coffee, my dear user. There's nothing I'd love more ..."

I don't use ChatGPT much myself, but I can see its potential if you can have consistent responses with "personalities"/"characters" for games.

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#52

Post by rzzzt »

btown wrote: post #4

Next up: an AI that can watch a deceptive mobile game ad and actually create the game that they're falsely advertising! Jokes aside, this is very cool. There's always the interesting tension of vendor lock-in vs. portability that defines the low-code space. Roblox's social ecosystem allowed it to make exclusivity to its platform a selling point to incentivize creators, but that might be harder for browser delivery -…

It is in fact a reference to "How to Dial a Murder", an episode of Columbo.

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#54

Post by kevindamm »

kskobelev wrote: post #43

Made a 'God of YC' with the AI Character template: https://play.rosebud.ai/games/9b26ade8-1e5a-413a-8852-03d4c8...

It ran out of tokens when I asked how to make a successful pitch.

Annoying that the text box doesn't scroll as the chat overflows the visible area, I had to keep helping it along. Especially given how chatty YCombinator the character is, it seems worth fixing. Question is how easy was it to find the relevant piece of the generated code's whereabouts.

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#55

Post by Farida-Rosebud »

ldoughty wrote: post #51
Farida-Rosebud wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We have one game in progress by one of our beta testers that has some VN vibes/elements: https://play.rosebud.ai/games/91d54c96-378d-4c64-b71b-4841fc... Here you chat with this grandma, make here drink coffee inside and go outside (she'll comment on both of the actions a bit haha).

Would Rosebud help in making consistent characters? I tested out that example game. I asked her "do you like coffee", and Grandma replied "I despite coffee...". However, when you say "lets drink coffee" she says "Oh, absolutely! Let's drink coffee, my dear user. There's nothing I'd love more ..." I don't use ChatGPT much myself, but I can see its potential if you can have consistent responses with "personalities"/"ch…

We definitely strive to make super consistent characters possible on Rosebud. I might be wrong but I think this user in particular set this grandma to be a bit quirky like that.

A lot depends on how detailed the user's description for the character is. But eventually there might be some issues with forgetting things deep into the chat as a limit to current LLM possibilities. We want to try and solve this by introducing saves, but still experimenting!

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#56

Post by kskobelev »

kevindamm wrote: post #54
kskobelev wrote: post #43

Made a 'God of YC' with the AI Character template: https://play.rosebud.ai/games/9b26ade8-1e5a-413a-8852-03d4c8...

It ran out of tokens when I asked how to make a successful pitch. Annoying that the text box doesn't scroll as the chat overflows the visible area, I had to keep helping it along. Especially given how chatty YCombinator the character is, it seems worth fixing. Question is how easy was it to find the relevant piece of the generated code's whereabouts.

Good suggestions, just fixed it! It has autoscroll now and also clears the input on submit. Thanks AI for help, that was easier than I expected

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#57

Post by YesBox »

lishali88 wrote: post #28
azraellzanella wrote: post #24

Impossible not to think about this -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed an…

Really depends by what lens you use for "better" (let alone for the entire industry), IMO. I think there is truth in that statement, but only in a historical context when breaking into the industry required a publisher and creating a game required writing your own engine; that truth dwindles as the markets approach (real) saturation. (And there's an argument to be made that those two filters were actually great for filtering people who can create memorable games)

People take pride in craftmanship. If AI can match that, that isn't better for them. More choices (competition) means more money diverted in marketing and ads. That isn't better for game studios and all their non-marketing branches.

All this to say, the more competition there is on the market, the winners end up being marketplaces, not game studios. Music is a commodity at this point. PC/Console video games are far behind that, but walking the same path. Mobile games are not far behind music. IIRC about 80-90% of mobile games development budget is for marketing and ads. There are around 10x mobile games released every year, compared to Steam.

I'm biased because I'm working on my own (PC) game, and I am very grateful to be working on this before the tidal wave hits. It will probably be awhile before AI can match hand-crafted/polished digital experiences.

Just sharing my thoughts as a game developer who grew up in the 90s. This isn't personal, humans will almost always take the path of least resistance. If AI matches expert level output, the outcome is inevitable.

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#58

Post by lishali88 »

jncfhnb wrote: post #46
lishali88 wrote: post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

There's no confusion at all about whether we are trying to a UGC platform to make games (i.e AI Roblox). We are definitely not an asset store. Even though you can create assets in Rosebud, it's a feature of the entire workflow, which is focused on converting user descriptions to games. I think some confusion may be arising from just going to rosebud.ai and seeing the demo video. Instead go to https://play.rosebud.ai/…

Yeah I’m hearing that but it seems very much like you are selling art, an LLM character service, and some dev/packaging. I don’t think you’re going to reap much benefits from aggregating all these together. Feels like a shovelware machine. One of your homepage trending projects also used Star Trek IP. Like your value prop is description to game. Ok. But doesn’t that mean that if the description to game is too complic…

We are happy our custom image models are liked by our users and I think helping game devs make good game assets/art is a valuable problem to solve, but not one we are focused on. The first 3-4 years of Rosebud we focused on image generation based app, so I have thought a lot about the opportunity of focusing on a image/asset gen as the main feature of the product. I would argue that it generally has a thinner moat with more capped upside and can more easily be toppled by foundational model companies like OpenAI (with the exception of Midjourney, which is amazing because they have the moat of a community that guides their stronger aesthetics). Furthermore there are a number of other services that focus just on asset gen, and we allow uploads (from assets generated elsewhere) in addition to our own custom models for asset generation for that reason.

The opportunity I am excited most about, and what Rosebud is focused on, is to increase the number of creators of games by many orders of magnitude. That is why we are leaning into an llm native approach for game dev. I also know that the current best models for code gen will be improved dramatically in the next few years and that will have have an even greater impact on the consumer behaviour of who gets to make games and who gets to build software in general. Building a platform around game creation, not just asset gen, will be able to absorb this impending tidal wave of change that I don’t think even incumbent developer tools like Unity or Unreal can address as fast as a startup such as ourselves. The entire game creation work flow is going to get much more intuitive, faster and ultimately be able to generate the quality of games to compete with AAA. Now it is not there, but soon it will be. The game genres we support may look more opinionated and constrained now (ai characters, RPGs, some 3D) but that’s the first step in being able to let our agent based code gen platform perform well in prod. We are making choices that allow us to absorb llm advances later and that generalize well once those improvements happen.

Also, on the IP point, once we let people monetize on the platform, we will be much more strict about what gets to be monetized (i.e only things where it’s ok from an IP point of view).

Re: Launch HN: Rosebud (YC S19) – Turn game descriptions into browser games

#60

Post by mattigames »

lishali88 wrote: post #28
azraellzanella wrote: post #24

Impossible not to think about this -> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Video_game_crash_of_1983

My take is that whenever we can break down barriers to allow more creators to enter, it's ultimately better for the entire industry. As a platform we can work on curating and filtering for high quality game content from our users, but that's a problem of curation rather than artificially limiting creation for fear of people making low quality content. Most content quality like many things are power law distributed an…

It's there any precedent of this happening before? If I had to bet I would bet on the opposite, that is that the general population would get fatigue from so many games and would stick to old brands/companies and just ignore games from unpopular sources, the small games that would succeed are those that _cannot_ yet be generated by AI, that is that have mechanics hard to infer from existing games, eventually AI would learn to make those games too but by then the existing game company would have some reputation of its own.
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