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Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

roganmurley.com

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Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#51

Post by esnard »

sakjur wrote: post #34
esnard wrote: post #2

Wow, I also spent years reading those guides before playing by first ever Pokémon game. I even started to write my own guide. As a child, it was very fun. Now I'm wondering how many people share the same experience.

I had a guide for Wind Waker that I’d enjoy reading and mostly appreciating the artwork from (I’m not sure I even could read English when I first bought the guide), yet I didn’t have the game and only played occasionally at friend’s places. I remember planning to collect all the statues in that game. I never did, and likely never will, but I’ve enjoyed Wind Waker more recently and it really is a great game and I woul…

I also had that guide!

But I feel like that this isn't really the same experience. The Pokémon guide feels closer to the game than the Zelda one, especially since the Zelda games are known for their riddles - which are very hard to properly transcribe in a guide, imo.

Some of Zelda's best riddles can be rendered useless as soon as you read the solution (thinking about a very good one in Phantom Hourglass I'll never be able to experience again) - but the Pokémon ones still feel fresh, especially since the games rely so much on exploration, grinding and battling.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#52

Post by theptip »

I've been pondering this recently; I think there are some really fun applications of LLMs to game dev that have not yet been explored.

Going back to the original AI Dungeon (text-based adventure game, fully-generated by LLM), it was a lot of fun, but hallucinations were crazy. You could just ad-lib a change to the world-state and it would run with it.

One possibility would be to have an LLM act as a DM and use Tool APIs to drive a world model; for example, the DM can call `moveMonster(newPosition)` a la the Voyager paper. The game engine enforces constraints, so you can't just conjure items out of thin air. The player isn't interfacing with the LLM directly, so they don't see the hallucination problem.

It feels like lots of experiments have already been done with pulling NPC dialog from LLMs, but what about crafting worlds (most easily in text-based games, but potentially graphical too) and then reifiying them into the engine? Perhaps this could make more cohesive procedural worlds, since you can have the stories in the world's history drive the actual layout of the areas, scenes, and characters.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#54

Post by sakjur »

esnard wrote: post #51
sakjur wrote: post #34

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a guide for Wind Waker that I’d enjoy reading and mostly appreciating the artwork from (I’m not sure I even could read English when I first bought the guide), yet I didn’t have the game and only played occasionally at friend’s places. I remember planning to collect all the statues in that game. I never did, and likely never will, but I’ve enjoyed Wind Waker more recently and it really is a great game and I woul…

I also had that guide! But I feel like that this isn't really the same experience. The Pokémon guide feels closer to the game than the Zelda one, especially since the Zelda games are known for their riddles - which are very hard to properly transcribe in a guide, imo. Some of Zelda's best riddles can be rendered useless as soon as you read the solution (thinking about a very good one in Phantom Hourglass I'll never b…

I hadn't thought of it like that, but I agree with you. The magic of good puzzle design lies partly in figuring it out yourself and feeling clever, and you miss out on that when reading the solution to the puzzle in a guide.

I absolutely loved what Phantom Hourglass and Spirit Tracks did with the hardware they had available to them in terms of game design. I'd love to see a remaster of Spirit Tracks, but I'm not sure it'd be possible to capture the cleverness of their controls (admittedly not always a good thing) and puzzles on the Switch?

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#55

Post by dexwiz »

itishappy wrote: post #46
countWSS wrote: post #40

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"Its called code" Can you code a million games per day? The barrier to entry if this works out, would allow anyone to make such games by simply writing down a few pages of "mods" every hour. Or if you force ChatGPT to creatively generate some changes, it could be automated. Hundreds of games per hour? Local models trained on some custom dataset could generate these wikis in batches. Thousands of new games per hour! A…

> Can you code a million games per day? Is there a market for thousands of custom games per hour? Games designed without clear design goals or quality control? Games where the player is the alpha tester for mechanics generated with no guarantee of consistency or even functionality? It's like our modern mobile game landscape, but worse. I find such vision somewhat revolting, tbh.

Is the modern mobile any worse than steam? If anything it seems like the popular mobile games are highly refined, primarily to extract money.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#56

Post by 93po »

esnard wrote: post #2

Wow, I also spent years reading those guides before playing by first ever Pokémon game. I even started to write my own guide. As a child, it was very fun. Now I'm wondering how many people share the same experience.

I spent weeks and months taking a dozen different guides online in .txt format and combining and editing them together and doing my own editorializing. I carried this around on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and anytime my parents dragged me somewhere boring that had a floppy drive, I'd sit on whichever computer I found editing my guides while they did boring adult stuff. Usually at a family member's or friend of the family's house.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#57

Post by kridsdale1 »

john-radio wrote: post #18
idle_zealot wrote: post #12

> Changing a game becomes as simple as modifying a wiki I feel like an implementation of Pokemon Yellow in a reasonably modern high-level programming language would be easier to reason about and modify than a sprawling wiki written in English.

Yes, I got the sense from reading this that the author has neither spent a lot of time contributing to a wiki, nor writing software, because both tasks are scarily complex in a way that the blog entry skates over. But then I clicked "About" and I see they are in fact a staff engineer at reddit, so shows what I know.

Reddit isn’t known for having great software though.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#58

Post by idle_zealot »

hitekker wrote: post #41
john-radio wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Yes, I got the sense from reading this that the author has neither spent a lot of time contributing to a wiki, nor writing software, because both tasks are scarily complex in a way that the blog entry skates over. But then I clicked "About" and I see they are in fact a staff engineer at reddit, so shows what I know.

The hubris of solving social problems with technical solutions is a pipe dream many corporate engineers fall into. I think that's because real social problems, i.e. conflicts, are handled by their managers.

While I've definitely seen the trap you're describing, this isn't it. This is less "solving a social problem with technology" and more "anyone could code if only they didn't need to learn those pesky programming languages". Which is odd to see coming from an engineer who should understand that a programming language is just a precise specification of behavior. I guess the main thought in the blog post is that you don't need to actually specify your problem domain because an LLM can infer the details from context and its training data? Which may be true (at some point) but still doesn't make English a good programming language.

Re: Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

#59

Post by itishappy »

dexwiz wrote: post #55
itishappy wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Can you code a million games per day? Is there a market for thousands of custom games per hour? Games designed without clear design goals or quality control? Games where the player is the alpha tester for mechanics generated with no guarantee of consistency or even functionality? It's like our modern mobile game landscape, but worse. I find such vision somewhat revolting, tbh.

Is the modern mobile any worse than steam? If anything it seems like the popular mobile games are highly refined, primarily to extract money.

Exactly. I'd argue there's still quite a gap between the PC/console and mobile markets. Mobile games aren't bad, per say, they just feel like they're optimized for revenue extraction vs entertainment. As an example, look at the expectations around big franchises when they launch mobile titles, e.g. Diablo: Immortal or C&C: Legions.

I see your point though. Steam's quality has been getting less and less consistent, particularly when it comes to early access titles. Maybe a better example would have been NSFW Steam games: a monotonous landscape devoid of originality sold for a few bucks a pop.

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