AI Roguelite News

[h2]Quests V4[/h2]

Hard to believe we’ve already been through 3 iterations of quest systems. V1 was just a single task you could perform at a single location. V2 and V3 were multi-stage and a bit more immersive, but still designed for an “older” era (just 1-2 years ago) when LLMs weren’t nearly as powerful. Quests V4 is the next logical step to take this game to the next level of immersion, and utilizes the capabilities of modern LLMs for storytelling much more effectively than before.

When you start a new quest, an entire plot line is now generated using your world background and story so far. As you complete the tasks, you reveal more of the plot.

The plot is not set in stone. At any time, if you express interest to take a different path, or if the AI thinks a task became impossible (e.g. an essential NPC died), the remaining tasks will be regenerated.

The last task of each quest segment contains a choice, where each choice leads to a different ending.

At every turn, if you are tracking a quest, an event check is included to see if you progressed along the current task. Possible outcomes are: No change, instant completion, partial completion, or task became obsolete (due to player picking a different strategy, or task becoming impossible).

At each stage when you complete a task, an extra story turn may be generated which reveals more of the plot line and introduces you to the next task.

Any action you take has the potential to progress your current task, but if you feel stuck or uncreative, just click the orange button which will generate 3 options somewhat relevant to your current task.

Finishing a quest will create a persistent world status effect that lasts for a configurable number of turns (defaulting to 10).

Quests V4 applies only to new saves. Older saves can continue questing on the Quests V3 system.

A number of issues were uncovered in the Beta and since fixed, and the feature is now being rolled out to the Default build. The fixes include:

• Fixed story turns being broken
  
• Fixed tooltip text going off screen
  
• Changed format of task generation to reduce chance of error when using smaller models
  
• Increased token limit for local API options to reduce chance of error when generating quest tasks
  
• Tweaked prompt for story result from task result, reducing chance of a disconnect between finishing one task and starting the next one
  

Please report any remaining issues in the Discord or Steam discussions.

[h2]Event Checks UI Overhaul[/h2]

Event check messages have been converted to icons, which reduces clutter in the text view. Mousing over the icons provides more info about the triggered event check. Additionally, some event checks are now player-controlled and require you to click on them to confirm them, which helps mitigate false positives.

[h2]Story turns minor overhaul[/h2]

The logical representation of the text view has been improved, so now editing a story turn can finally cause it to be reflected in the text.

[h2]Misc[/h2]

• Generic exception message now includes a link to Player.log (finally) which you should include in any bug reports
  
• Removed deprecated “local” option. You may of course still play locally using one of the supported local text gen options (kobold or oobabooga).
  

[h2]New Game Overhaul[/h2]

[h3]Starting Item[/h3]

Players now get 1 starting item at the start of the game.

[h3]More Customization[/h3]

Improved customization for new games. You can now optionally pre-generate the initial locations, starting quest, inate abilities, starting item, and passive skills. You can re-roll these generations individually as many times as you want. You can also manually edit the fields, although editing the starting item or innate abilities is restricted to creative mode due to being OP.

Moddable world presets can also include these new fields. Sometimes you might choose to predefine some of the options for a preset, such as some ability names or a starting quest you find interesting. However, in many cases, you may want to leave these fields empty, which indicates that they should be AI-generated at the start of each new game (to increase variance and replayability).

[h3]Easy exporting of world presets[/h3]

Moddable world presets have been updated to a more future-proof format, though the game should still support old versions. You can also export your current preset as a new json file, which provides a much easier way to create customized presets to share with others.

[h3]Improved location generation[/h3]

In the case of pre-generating initial locations, you can optionally provide additional instructions to the AI. This can greatly influence how it generates the locations. A demonstration of this is included in the pre-bundled preset “UC Berkeley” which replaces “College”. In this case, I instructed the AI to generate real-life locations, and it did so successfully (including Top Dog, La Burrita, Cheeseboard, Sproul Plaza, and various other restaurants and campus locations).

[h3]Visual Improvements[/h3]

Updated fonts to be consistent and made the Auto-Generate button more prominent to encourage its use.

[h2]ComfyUI Custom Workflows[/h2]

Logic for how the game uses ComfyUI has been expanded to allow custom workflows. Instructions in the readme file inside the model-params directory.

Wombo image gen was down for several hours. The image gen was broken in an unconventional way, where it would allow you to download a PNG file, but the PNG file would be corrupted. This update prevents that kind of issue from breaking game logic, so you can still at least play the game without getting error messages. It also lets the game automatically delete corrupted PNG files so that they may be generated if you reload that save.

At almost the exact time I pushed this update, Wombo was fixed again, so there should be no change in behavior for those reading this.

Note that if this happens in the future, Stable Horde is a good fallback for free image generation. Their response times seem to have greatly improved from how it was several months ago.

[h2]Level Scaling[/h2]

Implemented level scaling, which is configurable when starting new games. When you enter a new area, the NPCs and enemies which spawn are capped to approximately X levels higher or lower than you, where X is the configurable “level difference cap”. As well, events and effects which would’ve used the area level are now calculated using the level-scaling-adjusted area level.

It is not retroactive to older saves. If you want to manually edit your old save to use this feature: First load the game and save it again, which triggers saving the default values for the new fields. Then go into my_save.txt and edit both instances of “lvlDiffCap” to the desired number greater than or equal to 0 (the lower the number, the more intense the level scaling).

[h2]General Improvements[/h2]

• Removed quest minimum level requirement because it doesn’t make sense with Locations V2. This is just a stopgap measure until a more comprehensive quest overhaul is implemented in the future.
  
• Fixed bug where http calls weren’t parallelized as well as they could’ve been. The speeds of Sapphire and Silver cloud gen are now significantly improved.
  
• Image gen: Player’s image is now generated before everything else.
  
• Edit region name/description: Right click a region in the map to edit its name or description.
  
• Fixed Wombo image gen issue which would happen about 0.1% to 20% of the time depending on your computer, where the generated image wouldn’t appear in the game.
  
• Improved display of saves in loading menu (includes player name and level scaling amount, if available).
  
• Undo point is now added when creating one’s own recipe