No Cats, Dogs Or Humans Were Involved In The Making Of This Game

For almost as long as I've been playing video games there have been programs or utilities or apps that were supposed to help people with few or no programming skills make their own games. Some were fairly successful, opening up whole new sub-genres in which amateur enthusiasts and semi-professional creators marketed and sold their - often generic and frequently quite similar - efforts to each other like stallholders at a craft fair. And then there's Roblox but I think I'll side-step that little landmine.

A few, like The Quill,  Neverwinter Nights 2 or RPG Maker, had entire sub-cultures built around them. Games made using them were released commercially. People made money. But the thing about all of them was that you still had to do a lot of the heavy lifting yourself. 

The pitch of many game-making apps is that you'll be able to make commercial quality games with no technical experience. The implication is that it'll also be easy and require no effort. The first might possibly be true. The second most definitely is not.

I made adventures with both The Quill and NWN2 and it took me weeks of work each time. The utilities did a good job of making the process accessible to a non-coder but there was still a great deal of learning involved even before I got down to the part that really interested me, writing the plot, the descriptions and the dialog.

Now, though, we have the prospect of AI to do it all for us, for real this time. All we'll have to do is tell the AI what we want and it'll give it to us, like when you tell a genie your wish. Except we all know how careful you need to be with those wishes. A genie isn't your friend, it doesn't have your best interests at heart - and it can be a lot harder to put one back in its bottle than it was to let it out.

Here, kitty, kitty, kitty! Now where did those darn cats go?

Never stops anyone trying, though, does it? A lot of heavyweight gaming companies are making all kinds of noises about how generative AI and LLMs are going to make making games easier or faster or more efficient. And more profitable of course. Let's not forget that part.

For the moment, most of them are being cautious about what they say in public. Those with the smarter marketing departments will be aware that even mentioning an interest in AI could cause some potential customers to look elsewhere for their entertainment. 

The acceptable line to take seems to be that AI is just another tool in the box for professional artists, writers and designers, a pitch that has the considerable benefit of following a very well-established historical pattern for new technology, almost every example of which, no matter how reviled when first encountered, ended up being assimilated into the production process and accepted by the audience. 

Unlike any previous technological innovation, though, generative AI appears to have the potential to be considerably more than a tool for creators. Some people, on both sides of the argument, believe it can replace human creativity entirely. 

Enter Bitmagic. Here's the full description from Steam:

"Bitmagic brings 3D game creation to Steam for anyone, whatever language they speak, wherever they are. Creators just type in a description of the game they want to create; and watch it appear before their eyes; no design skills, no coding or technical knowledge required. It’s really that simple.

Bitmagic creates the game concept for you, builds the background story and creates an immersive 3D world around the story. The games are fully playable and easily tunable through the same text prompt."

There's also a disclosure which, judging by the phrasing, appears to have been added at Valve's insistence:

"AI GENERATED CONTENT DISCLOSURE
The developers describe how their game uses AI Generated Content like this:

Players can create and modify games using text prompts. The game uses AI (LLM) to understand the player's request and then uses LLM to construct the game using a pre-defined asset library."

Bitmagic is currently available through Steam as a free Playtest although right now you can't just download it and try it out. You have to request access, which just takes a click of a button on the Steam Store page.

At the moment the wait time is minimal. I clicked the button on Thursday and on Friday I got an email telling me I'd been invited to join the test. I was very curious to see how it worked so I installed the client and logged in straight away.

So far I've spent just over half an hour with Bitmagic. I think it's quite unlikely I'll add much to that. I've seen about as much as I need to for now. 

I don't intend to review it. It's on Steam. It's free. If you're curious, go try it for yourself. 

What I am going to do is describe what I saw and what I did and why I was both impressed and disappointed. The game (I'll call it a game for convenience.) runs in Unity and places calls to ChatGPT as required. In less than thirty-five minutes I made two games and played one of them to the finish. I also played one of the three games made by other people, featured on the login screen.

That's a lot to get through in just over half an hour. It suggests that the claim of instant game creation isn't all that much of an exaggeration. And it's not, always assuming the game you want is one where you run around collecting objects by running through them. Both the games I made and the one I played that had been made by someone else had that - and only that - as the gameplay.

The basic process is incredibly simple. You just type something into a text field and wait for about a minute. Then a big window pops up telling you what your game is called and giving you a brief description. Anyone who's ever used ChatGPT will immediately recognize the prose style.

Actual contents may differ.

You can then log in and play your game. You'll get to play as a pre-generated character. At first I assumed that would also be AI-created on the fly but as far as I can tell you just get allocated one of the half- dozen you can see on the Store page. One time I got the woman with the afro, another the green elf. 

The game-worlds looks quite pretty. The controls are simple and they work well. The game gives you a quest or task to do and there's a directional indicator to tell you where to go to do it. Other than that, there's absolutely no explanation of any kind, neither for the game itself nor for the creative mode you can enter to "tune" it.

That was my main complaint: lack of documentation. Other than that, I found the whole thing mildly impressive in that it genuinely does create a complete - if extremely simple - game in seconds. The games it created for me weren't the games I'd asked for but I guess you can't have everything.

For my first game I asked for a game in which a black and white dog caught a ball. I got as game with no dogs, where I ran around finding soccer balls. For my second, I asked for an RPG in which I could play as a cat. I got one where I played as an elf who had to find an Enchanted Moonstone. (Spoiler: I never found it.)

Mono-pups? Make that Zero-pups!

That ought to be where the tuning comes in. You should be able to tweak the game to get it closer to what you're after. And I guess you might be able to do it, if you could figure out how. I couldn't, at least not before I lost interest in trying.

I did manage to make some changes. It's very easy to spawn objects or creatures into the game. I worked that out fast enough. You do really only have to type in a request and the game will make it happen. I asked for a tiger and I got a tiger. I asked for some rabbits and I got some rabbits.

Most impressively, I asked for a sword I could pick up and use and I got one. It appeared on the ground and I was able to click on it and have it appear in my character's hand. So far so cool.

Unfortunately, anything I asked the game to do that involved more than spawning things and picking them up was just ignored, as were some quite specific requests. I asked for "a very large tiger" and got a regular-sized tiger. I asked for "some large rabbits" and got some rabbit-sized rabbits. I asked for a sword I could pick up and use to kill things with and I got a sword I could wave around and have any creature in the world completely ignore. 

My inability to affect the environment wasn't limited to things I'd created, either. One building I went in was full of keys. I could pick the keys up and they went into my inventory. There were chests lying around all over the place outside. I could not find any way to interact with those chests using the keys. Whether they were supposed to or not I have no idea.

Suure... "Very large"...  for a house-cat!

I thought it was possible all these things could be made to work somehow but I couldn't figure out how to do it, so I went looking for instructions. I couldn't find any, not in the game, on the Store Page or on the official website. 

I did find a few videos on YouTube, one of which is by Jani, the CEO of Bitmagic, in which he gives a "Behind-the-scenes Tutorial". That sounded ideal. Unfortunately, about all it showed was how to spawn things then blow them up or knock them down. He also drove around in a jeep and demonstrated how you could change the weather and time of day. I suspect that may be all you can do right now.

Whether you'll ever be able to do anything else is, I guess, the big question. As it stands, Bitmagic could be a fun toy but it's not going to make games for you. Well  it'll make one game that you can fit with different skins and that's barely a game at all. 

As proof of concept, though? Maybe. Bitmagic is getting regular updates so it's worth keeping an eye on. I'd say it would need to be a lot more versatile for to expect much of a take-up but then... Roblox...

Bitmagic wasn't the only AI-related game I played on Steam these last couple of days. This morning I spent almost fifty minutes with a demo called Ale and Tavern: First Pints. I'm not going to review this one, either, although I should stress that it was made by humans - it's not any kind of AI production. 

Bar work? Hard pass.

Except...

The reason I downloaded it and gave it a look was something I saw in a couple of the reviews. The demo has been very well-received. It has Overwhelmingly Positive rating from around seven hundred reviews. One thing a couple of people didn't like, though, was the AI voice acting.

That made me curious. I'm not sure I've heard any AI voice acting in a game yet. I've heard a lot of AI grunting but not proper dialog, spoken aloud. So I installed the demo and played through it to see what that might sound like.

Fine. It sounded fine, although I don't have all that much to go on.  I didn't play the demo all the way to the end (It's really not my kind of game.) but in the three-quarters of an hour I spent with it I only heard two characters speak; the PC and a Merchant. 

The Merchant did have a fair amount to say and my character answered him a few times so I think got to hear enough to say that I have no idea how anyone knew it was AI-generated speech to begin with, if it even is. I can't see anywhere it says so other than in those reviews and had the idea not been put into my mind, I can't imagine it would ever have occured to me. 

What's more, although the performance seemed a bit exaggerated and actorly, I thought it generally sounded better than most voice acting in games like this. All the stresses came in the right place and all the line readings felt right, which is certainly above par. Plus the spoken and written dialog matched exactly for a change.

Kinda hard to take a screenshot of what something sounds like.

If this is the standard of AI voice in games, I wouldn't imagine most players would even notice. I certainly wouldn't. It's a tad bland, sure, but there's nothing unusual about that. I've heard plenty worse. In fact, it's exactly the kind of voice-work I wouldn't normally comment on. It's not very immersive or convincing but it certainly wouldn't put me off playing.

The more I think about it, the less convinced I am it even is AI. and that's the fear, isn't it? If players can't tell if something's been put into the game by a human or an AI, are they going to care? At that point it becomes an ethical issue and gamers and ethics haven't always - or often - been bedfellows. 

It's a problem that's only going to become more difficult as the technology improves. It reminds me of the ridiculous news stories that turned up in my feeds after Dua Lipa's headlining performance at Glastonbury last weekend, when people took to social media to rant about her performance not being "real" because she was too good. 

Apparently she sounded so perfect she had to be faking. Of course, she wasn't but if people can't even tell the difference between a real person singing live and a recording, what are the chances of them spotting an AI talking in a video game?

The game may not be so great but the view's pretty good.

As for the companies that make the games it will, as always, come down to the bottom line. If it makes more money they'll do it. They may learn to be a bit cannier about how they do it but they'll do it, alright.

One thing I think we can count on: no matter how good the tech gets, we won't be making our own games at the click of a mouse any time soon. That would be like giving away the farm. At best we might get something that lets us play at making games but I wouldn't even count on that. 

I'd lay odds that if any full-feature AI game-making apps do eventually appear, it'll be still down to us to do most of the creative work, making it a niche product for hobbyists like all the rest. Anything that's genuinely able to churn out commercial quality games at the touch of a button is going to be locked up safely in a warehouse somewhere and never seen again. 

It's one thing to have AI replace your workers but you don't want it to replace the whole damn business! Then where would your bonuses come from?