copygirl

The idea is that “roguelike” = a game like Rogue, which according to some people, requires checking most if not all of the boxes including ASCII, proc-gen, perma-death, turn-based, … while the term “rougelite” is less strict. But I think we’re past the point of that distinction being adopted into mainstream.

ECS already makes it a hundred times easier for me to conceptualize game mechanics, modify and extend them. Giving AI the ability the ability to create data separate from systems that use them will make it much easier for it to build a game. I don’t believe for a second it will be able to write functioning object-oriented game code for example. It will likely be best if it avoided coding via a text-based language altogether, and use visual scripting or another system based on chaining logic blocks together. But that still counts as the “system” part of ECS.

There is a possibility something like this will be possible in the future, but it’s not going to be an achievement of AI, it’s largely going to be the achievement of regular developers creating a general-purpose game engine that can be used to put together a game block by block, which can be utilized by both human game designers and AI. (Likely to better effect by the former.) I can imagine Entity Component Systems will play a big part of that.

One of the biggest blockers for AI making games is going to be testing it to select for better performance. With text it’s relatively easy to see if some text an AI produced is plausible. Images are also plentiful, but that’s a lot more subjective. With both of these it would also not take a massive amount of time to add a human element. It’s quick to check if a paragraph or image looks like it is a good response to the input promt. A game, however? How long do you need to play it to see if it’s fun? At best, perhaps, you can write an AI to control a bot character to see if it’s technically playable.

I don’t want to even think about the electricity that wlll be wasted training such models.