Playing the Game

The primary purpose of this project is not to create a game, but rather to study and assess the capabilities of generative systems for gaming purposes. For that reason, when designing the game systems, I tried to limit the scope of the game. Therefore the overview of the game is essentially as follows:

“In GameName, you’re the manager of an adventuring guild. Talk to NPCs, recruit them into your organization, and send them on missions. Mercenary Manager is a text-based adventure game where it is necessary to (convince, etc)”game is essentially, talk to NPCs, gather information

Just as there are two main ways generative AI are utilized in this game - NPCs and generative content, there are two main user-interactable systems in the game: conversations and missions. Conversations are how you interact with NPCs while missions are how you progress the game state. By interacting with NPCs, the player can get NPCs to join their group/guild as companions. The player then interacts with the world by sending their companions on missions. I note that all of this is text based in order to minimize the amount of work necessary to evaluate these genAI systems.

In literature, we see various papers which simulate entire worlds at a minute level; every minute NPC action, thought, and plan etc are simulated. This, to me, probably seems doable, but it’s simply more computationally expensive. Therefore I have chosen to progress the world in much larger time steps; ~12 hours. I will call each of these time steps a turn. During a turn, there are really just two things that you can do: communicate with NPCs and send your companions on missions.

First, we address communicating with NPCs. Because we have not (yet) implemented a physical world, the player must choose to talk to NPCs from a list of available NPCs. For more information on what makes an NPC available to talk with, reference section X. Anyways, communicating with NPCs can be done for various reasons. Maybe you’re brand new to the world and just want to learn about the world that you are now a part of. Maybe you want to make a friend with the NPC. You can go ahead and talk with the NPC, learn about their past experiences or inquire about their goals and aspirations. In this way the NPC functions pretty much just as a chat bot. However, NPCs are not just chat bots. The game also progresses by talking with the NPCs. NPCs are given access to important information which can only be attained by speaking with certain NPCs. In addition, by talking to NPCs you can potentially get them to join your guild. NPCs who have joined your mercenary guild, and thus are now companions, have companion-specific missions and objectives. Talking with NPCs/companions can unlock certain knowledge, missions, or new NPCs who you can in turn speak with.

Second, you must send your companions on missions. This can be essentially whatever the game designer wants them to be, but the gist of a mission is that companions leave the camp for some number of turns/hours in the day. When they come back, the player will get a write up in narrative form of what happened on the mission. The game state will then update/progress/branch etc depending on the outcome of the mission. I haven’t actually implemented turns yet, so missions are just completed right away, but it’d be fairly trivial