GenRealms | Powered by AI

Take charge of your favorite fictional universe. Make decisions that shape its destiny. You're free to do a great job or a terrible one—it's all up to you.

✨ Please rate the game and add any comments if you have ideas! ✨

How it works

This prototype is driven by ChatGPT 3.5 and takes inspiration from the classic 2002 web game "NationStates." This is the first prototype of a concept I've been interested in for a while where I handle the frontend and basic logic and GPT acts as game master.

Common errors

• The game might hang if it can't connect to the GPT API for some reason. It calls the API every time you request a new issue or get a result.
• The bars go from 0 to 1 with 1 being good and 0 being bad. GPT controls the bars so any unexpected behaviour will be due to GPT not following orders.
• I'm a newbie when it comes to configuring servers. Please let me know if you encounter any CORS errors.

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🆕 GenRealms: Desktop

Download GenRealms: Desktop for Windows below. GenRealms: Desktop allows you to enter your own OpenAI API key and select an endpoint - or enter a custom endpoint.

• The desktop version will only work if you enter your own API key. You can get one by signing up for the OpenAI API.
• Only Chat endpoints will work.
• You will need to choose 'More info -> Run anyway' to get the .exe to work on the Windows popup.
• Your API key will not be transmitted to me, or saved in any way. It will be used in the web request to OpenAI. This means your OpenAI account will be charged for any usage.

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Created in 1 week for the "GAME-A-WEEK" jam

What went right?

Thanks to the plugin Chat GPT for Games, Chat GPT integration was seamless and relatively simple to use. I already knew how to securely manage the server interactions for ChatGPT requests.

What went wrong?

Getting ChatGPT 3.5 to produce the kind of questions and evaluations I wanted was a bit of a struggle. It often gave extreme 'good or bad' judgments. Additionally, I ran into CORS issues when I launched the game on Itch, an obstacle I hadn't encountered before. Thankfully, it was a quick fix.

And what did I learn?

I had GPT-4 fine-tune the prompts I was sending to GPT-3.5, and the results were impressively refined. I also learned how to resolve CORS issues for deploying a server-connected game on Itch. But perhaps the biggest takeaway was discovering how effective GPT-4 can be as a coding collaborator.