A few years ago I started a side project to explore how AI tools can lead to novel gameplay experiences. The result is Rogue Story, in which players reorder words to craft a narrative adventure procedurally. It’s using a mix of pregenerated content and live text generation. It’s been hard to find the line between pregeneration and live generation. There’s \~1 million pregenerated sentences, sent in batches to ChatGPT. Most images were generated locally with custom loras. I had lots of fun generating various workflows in comfyui or directly in unity to handle all that data. I’m still discovering sentences / images that surprise me. 

The game is currently [available privately on itch.io](https://swah.itch.io/rogue-story?password=storyrogue). 

From a tech perspective, pregenerating offers lots of advantages: no delays, more control as output can be verified offline, and no live fees. One downside is that I needed to find lots of ways to limit the space of things to be discovered. There’s no point in generating a sentence for “cup king discovered” - it won’t ever be a valid sentence. Another downside is actually the size of text files loaded in memory, which is especially problematic on a webgl build. Detailed story chapters and story evaluation is done live, since the number of stories players can create easily go into the billions. A quick LLM writes the chapters, which gives me time to have a slower thinking LLM to evaluate the story for cohesiveness and adherence to specific criteria. 

I’m currently deciding on the future of the project and would love feedback from players who are already comfortable with AI-driven gameplay. Could you let me know if the base roguelike gameplay of creating stories from word cards is interesting to you? There’s an ingame survey, or you can post here. Thanks!

1 Million Pre-gen Sentences vs. Live LLM: a hybrid AI approach in the storytelling game Rogue Story