Ask HN: Constrained LLM Games
At the moment there are game systems like Renpy/Twine, with a sandbox environment, with character progression when you go through certain scenes, with maybe minigames, repeatable scenes, stats progression, and random elements. These kind of games need to be crafted by hand piece by piece, so the developer needs to write the Story, curate the images/audio/animations, do the programming of stats/animations/random events, and then manage the timelines of different events.
Then on the other hand you have AI Games that are basically an LLM with some context on top for world setting, and characters. Here I am of course talking about SillyTavern, character-tavern, infiteworlds and things like that. The problem with these is that the player themselves to restray themselves, because you can just go "And then I kill the evil darklord with a slap, find the dragonballs, and become supreme emperor of mankind for all eternity" all in one go. Plus the Story tends to be limited, and it doesn't really feel like a game with an artists vision, it just feels like what it is, an LLM with some flavor.
I was thinking of creating something that bridges the gap between these 2 game worlds, some kind of system very similar to Twine/Renpy, but instead of crafting the dialogue for each sequence, you as the game developer, would create checkpoints, with pre-set dialogue/images/scenes, at specific milestones.
For example let's say that we are playing a love game, where the player (Jack) has to seduce a romantic interest (Jill), instead of repeated multiple choices, or grind, let's say we give the AI the ability to raise/decrease the Love meter by 1-5 points at each encounter, so the AI would only have access to a tool that would raise it by this much and not anymore programmatically. Only at say Love level 20, would the instructions for how (Jill) operates, the images, choices open up. Crucially, the player has to actually speak with the AI by typing (speaking) at each event in order to change this Love meter.
So the features would be: -Player can only talk, or take certain actions (play minigames). Phrases like: "And then I kill the evil darklord with a slap, find the dragonballs, and become supreme emperor of mankind for all eternity" Would just be interpreted by the AI, as a weird thing said by the user. -The Gameplay is still a contained story, where the player has to unlock more and more features. -The whole idea of this, is to limit the player, take away the power that they have to immediately achieve anything, while still giving them the freedom to do whatever they want in a given setting. -Limit the number of back-and-forth conversations with the AI in one time-loop
I have seen the extension RPG Companion: https://github.com/SpicyMarinara/rpg-companion-sillytavern, but these seems more an attempt to keep track of the stats, rather than control them outright.
And I have found this article by Jacky Kaub: https://towardsdatascience.com/how-i-built-an-llm-based-game-from-scratch-86ac55ec7a10/
My questions to you is this, is there already a similar system? If not, what other features would you include in this?