Ask HN: What are you working on (August 2024)?

I and a friend are working on Elixir Emporium [0], a single-player crafting RPG that uses layers of generative AI to create and inject new game data as you play.

It started out as just a prototype asking what happens if you task an LLM with generating crafting recipes for every combination of items in a game (which was already super fun), but it's exploded into all kinds of crafting, harvesting, and item manipulation systems that literally weren't possible in games just 5-10 years ago.

Now we're working on NPC simulations based on last year's Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior [1] paper. Dialogue and persistent memory are obvious, but we're also using the ReAct pattern [2] to give NPCs an influenceable decision loop that dictates what actions they take throughout each game day. And there's some other fun stuff like quest generation and using LLMs as a decision engine to determine if certain player actions complete these dynamic quests.

There's still a lot of work to do to make it feel more like a polished game, but we've been focused on the underlying systems and getting them feeling great and I'm really excited to see the game come to life.

[0] https://store.steampowered.com/app/3039840/Elixir_Emporium/

[1] https://arxiv.org/abs/2304.03442

[2] https://react-lm.github.io/

I'm working on something similar but instead of basing my efforts on the generator agents paper I'm basing it on a technique I call narrative generation. It requires far less context and fewer prompts, and focuses on generating narrative aspects and letting the traditional game engine things simulate the remainder of the world.

As an example, with the system I am building you only need to input what action the player has taken, and all the NPC's actions and dialogues will be generated.