Current Progress

July Hiatus

July is still ‘hiatus’, kinda. I ended up tinkering a bit during my trip with some ideas and I’m expecting the second half of the month to give me some time to do so as well. I wouldn’t expect anything really new before August.

Current Project List

1. WarAmongTheStars v0.1 - Kinda not in the best of shape, not really well tested, and I’m gonna need to drop whats being playtested for the next iteration. So this will probably die prematurely unless I see more engagement with the autobattle website / testing of it.
2. WarAmongTheStars v0.2 - Basically give up on the ‘grand strategy automated game’ design for the time being and convert this to a discord nation roleplay. The goal being to build an audience for work in this vein by opening it up to the broader public, making it simple, making it heavily automated via a discord bot with slash commands. Nation roleplays are ‘popular enough’ on discord I should be able to recruit enough people to make it playable.
3. Delve The Dark v0.1 - Attacking the ‘build up a population for my body of games’ projects from a different angle and testing the ‘hero layer’ text prompts, this is just a simple linear roleplay with a decent variety (~10 different text responses per encounter) that would have not been particularly viable without using a LLM to generate on the fly based on various CYOA-style branches.
4. Fantasy Border Lord v0.1 - A CK2-style quest generated via LLM with some editing as a sort of manual strategy game prompt testing for something more open world than War Among The Stars will be. Poor engagement, not particularly inspiring results. That said, it is giving me a chance to play with context, chaining ‘character cards’ in prompts, and so forth so its a useful practice project for practical LLM prompting and minimizing hallucinations.
5. Status Observatory + Founder Homepage - Kinda a backend project meant to track my projects across the board and also detect code issues, failover between nodes in the ‘qa cluster’ I use at a very, very cheap hosting provider and so forth. Barely touching this right now but I don’t want it to fall off my radar as it’ll get more important once I move from the 5-10 player range to enough players interacting with stuff I’m not really keeping tracking of them.
6. AutomatedGamemaster v0.1 - An automated fantasy hexcrawl system focused on being something like microlite or a simple one-roll system from a mechanics perspective that requires human intervention/creativity to make ‘fun’ but the underlying mechanics and some basic posting capabilties exist. Basically, system-neutral-ish sandbox building with ‘insert monster type X’ stat block and a list of potential monsters that overlap popular fantasy systems (D&D SRD, PF2E SRD) monster lists.

Yes, I’m stupid for spreading myself this thin but the problem is I ultimately like all these ideas and the learning for how to prompt/automate stuff for one feeds into my main goal of a multilayer game from ‘adventurers’ (could be space pirates or whatever) to ‘guilds’ (private organizations of adventurers) to ’nations’ (run by a solo player or council) to ’empires’ (groups of nations) in a truly epic game. Each of these ideas feeds into one of the layers needed to make this work and develops a potential playerbase for the automated text game.

Maybe its a stupid dream of mine. We’ll see lol. I can always drop projects if they don’t gain traction.

Future Project List

1. Basically, the main goal is to build a game that mixes roleplay, grand strategy, and dwarf fortress style emergent narratives into a unifiied 4X game project. I’m still kinda unsure how to do this based on the feedback I’m getting, so I’m hoping widening the player pool in War Among The Stars v0.2 will solve the feedback loop issue. Some people want perfection from the narrative generation (LLMs make quite a few mistakes, I find it tolerable but not everyone does) combined with just ‘idle rpg’ or ‘idle strategy’ mechanics don’t seem to engage the existing players.
2. Actual projects that are not hobbies meant to make money. I’ve got a couple of ideas for this that are infrastructure related but tbh, they aren’t really worth building unless I want to be unemployed due to ‘professional grade projects’ are expensive in terms of time commitments and unless its super, super simple aren’t easy to do in your free time. This is the ‘pool’ of projects I dropped in my last post basically.