Design a Custom Game with Generative AI

Generative AI is a branch of artificial intelligence focused on generating entirely new content such as text, images, music, and game elements. It is a tool that can create captivating storylines, design intriguing characters, or craft challenging levels based on your preferences – that’s the magic of generative AI. Based on Large Language Models (LLMs), generative AI is created using deep-learning techniques.

In this tutorial, we will use generative AI to create a custom Tic-tac-toe game. Throughout this tutorial, we’ll discuss the techniques needed to effectively use generative AI.

A Custom Tic-Tac-Toe Game

Before we begin, let’s briefly review the traditional way of playing a game of Tic-tac-toe. The game is traditionally played on a 3x3 grid where players choose a symbol (usually ‘X’ and ‘O’) and take turns marking empty cells with it. The game ends when one of the following two conditions is achieved:

• A player wins by achieving a winning pattern: three marks in a row, column, or diagonal.
• The grid is full with no winning condition, resulting in a draw between the players.

While this is quite an enjoyable game to play, we can make it more fun by adding a custom twist to it. To help us with this task, we can use generative AI! The custom parts we will add to our game will be power-ups for players, a multi-dimensional board, and many more. We will use ChatGPT as the generative AI tool for this project.

What is prompting?

Let’s talk about the art of prompting. Prompting is like having a conversation with a wizard. You ask a question or give an instruction, and voila! The AI conjures up a response. The quality and structure of the prompt play a crucial role in the relevance, accuracy, and usefulness of the AI’s response. To understand more about prompting you can check out this tutorial. We will apply these prompting practices with a series of prompts with ChatGPT to generate a custom tic-tac-toe game.

Importance of conversation with AI

There are plenty of benefits when it comes to having conversations with AI chatbots but the major reasons to engage in a conversation with AI chatbots are:

• Conversing with an AI allows for dynamic interaction, where the AI can respond to follow-up questions, clarify points, and engage in a more natural exchange. This can also lead to AI gaining a deeper understanding of the task and responding with better outputs. But take caution before sharing any sensitive information in an interaction with an AI bot.
• Breaking big prompts into smaller ones makes it easier for the AI to understand what you are trying to achieve, so always try to plan your way out before hitting the AI chatbots.
• When we engage in conversation this facilitates learning through questioning, exploration of ideas, and the exchange of information.

Creating the custom game

Now, let’s dive into the fun part—creating your custom game! Here’s a roadmap for interacting with the AI chatbot:

1. Explain the goal.
2. Provide context.
3. State the request clearly.
4. Review and refine.

By following these steps, you can optimize your prompts and generate innovative ideas for your game. And if you’re ever short on inspiration, ChatGPT can aid in coming up with new ideas. For example, in this prompt, we first gave the overview of a Tic-tac-toe game and asked ChatGPT for ideas on how to create a custom game. Here is an example of how to craft the prompt:

Do you know the traditional tic-tac-toe game? Two players play on a 3x3 board. Players take turns marking empty cells with their respective symbols (usually 'X' and 'O') until one player achieves a winning pattern (three marks in a row, column, or diagonal) or the grid is full, which results in a draw between the players. I want you to suggest some ideas to create a custom Tic Tac Toe game.

The above prompt will result in different ideas, and we can choose any one of them and implement it. Like implementing custom patterns for the win conditions, adding some power-ups, or creating a 3D board where the players can play tic-tac-toe on a multi-dimensional board. Do you want to know the fun part? All of these ideas were generated by ChatGPT.

Response from the prompt:

Once you fix your interest in one of these ideas, you can start following up and discussing this idea with ChatGPT. For us, we decided to select the idea “Power-Ups and Abilities” and asked for the steps on how to implement it. Here’s the prompt example of our follow-up question:

I'm interested in adding a new dimension to my tic-tac-toe game by integrating 'Power-Ups and Abilities'. Could you provide a concise step-by-step explanation of how I can seamlessly integrate these features into the game? 

Here’s the response:

And just like that, we created a fun new way to play Tic-tac-toe!

Drawbacks and limitations of Using AI

Before we wrap up, let’s address a few issues that may arise when using generative AI. While AI is a powerful tool, it’s important to tread carefully. Always verify the response given by the AI by cross-checking it and doing external research. Sometimes, an AI may give a false answer that it believes is correct. This is called a hallucination.

Conclusion

In this tutorial, we have explored how to harness the power of ChatGPT to create a custom game. We learned how to use gen AI to brainstorm your ideas and how to structure a conversation with AI in this tutorial. We learned how to create a custom version of a tic-tac-toe game using ChatGPT. We have covered everything from the basics of prompts and input methods to advanced techniques for customizing AI suggestions. We also discussed the importance of a feedback loop and the ethical and practical considerations of using AI.

Remember, the possibilities with generative AI are endless, so keep innovating, keep creating, and let your imagination run wild! As AI technology evolves, so will the ways you can use it to enhance your productivity and creativity.

To see what else you can do with ChatGPT (or generative AI in general), checkout some of the topics covered in the articles located here: AI Articles.