Bored people do things. Bored women who're into gay Japanese animu characters do even more things.
This is a story of one such woman.
Anyway, to preface, I'd recently released a kooky Twine game to get the Halloween ghost thing off my chest after being very into CBS' Ghosts and binging the latest season of Haunted Hotel until 3 in the morning. I'd thought doing this would clear it up.
And it did! I actually thought I could go back to my peaceful non-developer life just drawing more niche animu VN assets... but then one morning I had Youtube on in the background and it shuffled to this particular video:
I sat there, just soaking the ambience of a Celtic Woman cover of my favorite woman in. But that wasn't all. That song had also taken me back in time to the lovely posts of "The Elf Guy", as most Itchers (is that what we're called?? Itchers? Users of Itch.Io are Itchers, right?? Or are we Itchiopians?) call him.
Now, if you don't already know, The Elf Guy's love for elves and all things elf is legendary. So is his hatred for dwarves, but after the whole Thingol shebang, who could blame him? That said, check out his posts:
Yup, all the same guy. Compelling, right?
Moving forward, I had also been very curious about how quickly AI games are created for a while now. So, with that song still stuck in my mind and the pained cries of The Elf Guy echoing in my consciousness, like a zombified Halfling with a dark chocolate Tim-Tam in her hand , I went to Google's prized Gemini AI and typed the words, "Create a game where a dwarf can walk around on the screen and interact with up to 3 elves."
BEHOLD.
That's right, I prompted a game about Elves with a Dwarf protagonist for a guy who loves elves and hates dwarves. Go figure.
At any rate, curiosity killed the cat and it really, REALLY got me. I now had the mechanics, and I wanted more. So I kept adding to it.
I added a Tic-Tac-Toe mini game,
an Elf's diary,
and even a fountain:
But that wasn't enough. By now I was really in the swing of things.
I wanted to add my own hand-drawn assets.
Now, this is crazy, considering drawing is the part most AI developers choose to skip (and therefore choose to generate those sweet, sweet AI graphics we have all come to know and love seeing on shovelware uploaded by 150-games-a-day AI agents), because drawing sprites, tiles and background items is as monotonous as fuck. But I chose to do that shit anyway, because I was a bored woman with time on her hands.
And then I upped the ante because... yeah, I just wanted to.
More things for me to draw! Whoo hoo!
All going great, right? WRONG. There was no romance option in the game. I had forgotten to prompt for it, and all the Elves are male.
So what do I do? Make one of the elves gay, of course!
Problem sooolved! ✨
Now, to be honest, I could be out there having tea with my girl friends instead. But truthfully, it's been a fun ride 29 odd versions in. You can actually see the filesize slowly grow as new lines of code get added to it.
I'd been working on it for three days now, in between other daily life stuff, and drawing new things along the way. I'm a bit surprised, considering I really could have just let AI generate it a couple of times with new prompts to create a new, more functional game, but I just had to have several sessions with one same file and tweak portions the coding and writing myself too.
I may actually have control issues, ngl. But all that time needed to see a mental health professional I would really rather spend on working on an AI-generated game about gay elves and a very bicurious dwarf instead.
Anyways, will this game ever be complete, and ever be published? I'm not sure. For a simple trashy walk-around-and-talk-to-characters LLM experiment, this sure is taking a long time, and I have no idea why I just can't stop and leave it alone.
I'll update this log as I go along.
