infinite potential. We will be able to create at least ten new forms of media each with its own aesthetics and traditions.
Despite the gloomy atmosphere of the 2020s and the 21st century in general, the world of culture is not in danger. It is about to give rise to a new universe.
project secret moth is an LLM-based text adventure with optional visual accompaniment. unlike many other LLM-based text adventures where you can basically do whatever you want and its open ended like a lucid dream, project secret moth has actual game structure built beneath and the LLM simply acts as an interpretative + narrative layer to generate description and cohere the varying game elements. in my schema of game design, things like ai dungeon (with no non-self-imposed win or loss state) or "just open ended chatting with an ai" are "toys", rather than "games". sure, they are fun, and you can make your own fun, but it requires a certain amount of buy-in that always leads me to bounce off of them.
project secret moth does not have that, in the prototype. it is a capital letters Video Game.
project secret moth has the same "win state" as any other yume nikki-like - collect all the effects and leave your bedroom.
the beginning of the game offers two modes - "personal" and "story". personal mode will have the narrative ai ask you psychologically probing questions so that it can customize the dream realms to your psyche. story mode will have it procedurally generate an individual, A Madotsuki, and put you in their shoes.
project secret moth does not have a freeform parser. like the very eldest text adventures, it utilizes verb commands - LOOK AT TORININGEN, USE KNIFE ON UBOA, and so on. there is a certain amount of flexibility - it will try to interpret your actions in a way that a traditional parser never can - but you are not free to do whatever you want. there is no macklankey. you are bound like all living things.
the initial prototype will be text-based only, offering a bedroom, 8 dream worlds (with an indeterminate number of extra layers and sub-areas), minor puzzles, NPCs, and the exciting "environmental cascade" system that allows you to solve area puzzles immersive sim style by manipulating the environment of higher-up layers. order a fan off amazon to make your dream worlds colder.
project secret moth will ship bundled with its own local large language model (the particular one is TBD) and will be built to run on relatively low-spec computers or ones with no GPU available, if possible. no internet connection will be required, and no information you send will be sent to external APIs. when the second prototype (with visual accompaniment system - see the attached images?) launches it will also be bundled with its own fine-tuned image model that, again, will be built to run on low-spec computers.
stay attuned
forget stuff like Good Flag Bad Flag and all that discourse, the world's best flags are those banners carried by Chinese lineage/support associations that have fringed edges and writing
I like to ignore the 'didacticism' of Undertale because it doesn't actually make any sense as real ethics or as an integration of ethics into the game. The genocide run's preachiness is better interpreted as campy atmospheric decoration
like, im not gonna fault you if your prerogative is making the rpg equivalent of, like, a walking simulator or whatever--that's a perfectly viable ambition. but if youre willing & able to compose a genuine challenge for that game, i think it's strange & inadvisable to limit it to (what great effort is taken to remind the player is) the Worst Route. the eclectic didacticism of that route is at odds with its actual contents--like, if you're trying to make the (agreeable!) assertion that the completionist max-stats overleveling approach trivializes & monotonizes gameplay & challenge, you probably dont then want to lock the best parts of your game behind doing that, right??
suspicious of how hololive fans convince themselves that every graduation is caused by idiosyncratic personal reasons of the vtuber in question and that the corporation doesn't have any responsibility
people often talk about how AI makes small choices that a human would never make if they were drawing the image, but when I see Reach's art I feel as if this tendency has been harnessed to create an atmosphere of almost hallucinatory vividness. It's beyond what I've seen in most illustrator's stuff
devil armor
make ugly art. NOWWWW
What I love about Akudama Drive so far is how it makes you totally enthralled with Cutthroat and full of contempt for the Kansai pd in a way that's not just/not *exactly* political. It's not that I hate Kansai pd because they're perpetrating injustice (although I'm sure they are.) I hate them because there's something pathetic and embarrassing about their attempts to enforce order at all. Even if they really were protecting innocent people from dangerous criminals, there's still something shameful about how they think they can end peoples' lives for 'justified' reasons... even if those reasons truly are justified by every ethical system that exists. Just look at how grotesquely their leader behaves --- that's their soul. They will always be flailing around in futility and an endless mess... in a way that's beyond all political definitions of oppression. This show is truly intoxicating.
Thinking about how a lot of the cultural-political worldbuilding in His Dark Materials might not even be true because it's filtered through the perspectives of biased characters. Things like, do the Northern Tartars actually form a distinct group, or is it just an abstract term the European characters use for a collection of peoples they don't fully understand? It doesn't seem like the Yenisei Pakhtars are connected at all to the Tartars attacking Muscovy. I feel the same way about the description of the insect automata as "Afric." The worldbuilding is full of ironic exoticism and we are never given a 100% objective look at how things work
I haven;t seen the show so I dont have an opinion on the tierlist, but it looks aesthetic doesn't it?