COLEMAN ANDERSEN
Video Game Writer
Lead Writer, Level Designer
What is it?
Robotopia is a narrative-puzzle game where every NPC in the game world is operated by a ChatGPT. Currently it is in a demo state. I have been developing it with a former lead developer for Minecraft Pocket Edition, who is spearheading the project.
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This means you can talk to characters about anything you want to. You can order them to walk, pick things up, throw things and jump. NPC interaction is open ended in a way that hasn't been achievable before.
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Robot heads can be detached and stuck onto just about any other machine in the game, including roombas. Different bodies give robots new functionality for puzzle solving.
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There are also language puzzles, which require the player to rhyme, decode or use logic to convince robots of something.
Learning the Technology
In order ​to write for this kind of game, I had to teach myself the basic functionality of large language models. It's a unique situation, because as the writer, I am directly affecting the functionality of the AI with how I word prompts to ChatGPT. It turned into a bit of an engineering position.
I am also a strong believer in having understanding beyond your specialized role. There are certain techniques I developed when working with ChatGPT that wouldn't have been possible if I hadn't understood the tech's underlying process. Because I understood the tech, I could communicate better with the lead developer, who was more focused on the tech, and less on the writing. Through collaboration we were able to reach a better product by approaching the development process from different angles.
Writing with Constraints
For every gameplay freedom ChatGPT provides, it brings an equal constraint. It cannot come close to matching human writing or acting. It can misunderstand things. It is easy to convince of anything. The list goes on.
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We discussed early on that ChatGPT wouldn't make for believable human characters. It sounds stiff and robotic. It is trained to be servile and bland. Rather than fight with the technology, we designed our story around this - a city full of robots all trained to serve humans. Within this context ChatGPT becomes palatable.​
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To make up for the lack of human characters, I wrote and directed several voice acted audio logs, and found other ways to work more traditional writing and acting into the game.
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I also discovered that ChatGPT was much better at producing meaningful statements if I could provide it with relevant information. Put differently, the writing process we settled on involved me coming up with hundreds, sometimes thousands of lines of backstory and example dialogue for each character. But it produced a ChatGPT that was much more interesting than the one we started with.
