October 2022 saw the return of the AI and Games Jam: a community led event in which
game developers of all shapes and sizes can participate in a one week event. The only catch:
you have to submit a game that fits our theme and has some form of AI in it. The AI can be
as super complicated as you like, but also as simple as possible. So in this video,
I'm going to wrap up this years event and take a look at some of
my favourite games from the jam and encourage you to go check them out.
The theme this year was Isolation: an idea that on the surface seems a little on the noise,
given y'know... that game y'all might have heard of. But, I stand behind it as an interesting
theme particularly given that we ran the jam at Halloween this year. It was funny actually as some
folk pointed out that it was good I didn't use this theme last year, given feels like it could
tie into a lot of themes prescient during the COVID lockdowns. This is amusing to me given last
years theme - Breaking the Rules - was actually a reference to a particular fuckwit in British
politics that sowed his own downfall for breaking the very rules he established, but no matter.
So yeah the theme of isolation allows for people to play with it in different ways. Some opted
towards the route of the player being physically isolated, be it in the setting or that they're
alone against some kind of opposing enemy force. Others took it as an opportunity for reconnecting,
with the idea to stop being isolated from others, either by saving other characters,
dating simulators, and what I can only describe as haunting simulators? It speaks to
the creativity of the community that we didn't just get a couple of dozen Amensia or Alien:
Isolation clones, though it's worth saying we did get some fun horror games in there too!
Now let's get into the fun stuff: the games themselves! I went ahead and played
the top 50% of submissions, and from that I have derived my own list of favourites.
These were the games that caught my attention and that I really fell in
love with when trying them out. So without further ado, let's check out the games!
It's worth starting with a mention for our #1 game in the public ranking and that's
this interesting twist on Solitaire by SLiV. It plays on the themes of Isolation by telling a
story in the cards, and the selection of the cards themselves. Naturally I won't spoil it for you,
but it goes into some pretty real places. As the developer states, there is an underlying
AI model that is making mistakes about what cards are where and how to respond,
though I didn't quite grasp that personally as I played it. Plus all the graphics for people (and
cats) you see on the cards are created using a generative adversarial network, a stlye GAN in
order to create the appropriate art style, which is a nice touch and an interesting spin on the
rules for using AI for the jam. I don't want to spoil the actual story that takes place here,
yes there's an actual storyline, so if you want to know more, go play the game!
Ambidextro is a cool little puzzle game that uses actual AI and twists it for a fun gameplay
mechanic. This here little robot is being powered by a planning AI that executes actions
in a sequence, but you decide what the rules are for whether it can execute a given action.
In fact some of the puzzles require the robot to be a in particular state in order to cross
a hazard, hence you need to decide how to model the preconditions of the actions
successfully. It's a *really* cool idea, and I am very excited to play it some more!
A very interesting puzzle game in which you feel you're being haunted all the way through
it. You're visiting an art gallery in which many of the art pieces wrere generated using AI tools,
meanwhile there's a whole bunch of jumpscares, lights going out,
creepy people in your periphery and more being controlled by an AI system. If you
were looking for a horror game, I think this is the one to check out!
Isolating Waters is probably my personal favourite in terms of its overall presentation and gameplay.
A dark and atmospheric game as players try to unpick a mystery at the bottom of the ocean.
It's actually a puzzle game, with a procedurally generation system running under the hood that
generates a new puzzle each time. It's a fantastic achievement overall and is ranks
both as one of my favourite games of the jam, but was also #2 overall in the public rankings.
I absolutely loved it, and I don't want to spoil it for you too much, go play this game.
The award for best roguelike goes to, well... Roguelike. This is a fun and
conceptually simple game of running around in mazes, collecting keys and using them to
reach the exit. It's not doing anything particularly fancy, but what it does do,
it delivers with a crisp aesthetic, and a lot of polish. Very cool game.
After I said it in the theme announcement, someone went and made a dating simulator! You
are effectively dating a computer, which y'know isn't weird at all. But you use a basic lexicon
for sentence structure allowing you to greet one another, ask each other questions and respond to
questions raised by the other character. It even pays attention to how one-sided the conversation
is, and whether you're talking too much about yourself and not asking enough questions. It's
inspired by classic AI-driven narrative games like Versu (a topic I really need to cover on AI
and Games at some point), and uses via a database that reflects an ontology of objects and concepts
for the system to understand. Plus it then uses a Utility AI to decide on how it answers and even
what questions it raises. A really cool idea that could be expanded out more in the future.
Roko's Basilisk is a fantasticly put together puzzle game about using different tools to
eliminate viruses infected the circuitry on your space ship. There's an overarching
narrative of an AI trying to help you by well… trying to kill you, but the puzzle game itself
is great and very interesting, with an AI opponent controlling the viruses that
infect your system. I thoroughly enjoyed this and would love to see more. Good job Kenny!
The award for 'best Dead by Daylight pun' is Dead by Roguelight, in which players
have to stop a group of friends from escaping a park environment by exposing them with your
flashlight. There are quite a few parallels here with the asymmetric horror game Dead
by Daylight and as someone who has played far too much of that game in the past two years,
I'm here for it. The friends you're playing hide'n'seek with are all trained using Deep
Reinforcement Learning, and are designed to avoid your flashlights and then sneak around
to the exit when they can. It's a pretty tough game at first! I won't lie in that I
found the best tactic, was to be a filthy camper and I am not ashamed to admit it!
The award for 'most riveting game for livestreaming' is Dark Isolation:
a game that takes place entirely in the dark until you die at the hands of, whatever creepy
thing that is chasing you. It's a game where you're being chased by a ghost in a maze,
but you can't see anything, and instead have to rely on your sense of sound. I won't lie,
I kept waiting for some kind of horrid monster to appear on the screen when I died akin to
something like in Devour on Steam. But the game mercifully doesn't do that. That said,
as you can see here, I played most of it trying really hard not to look at the screen.
Untitled dinosaur game is the only game submitted to the 2022 jam that
made me emotionally distraught when I got distracted for two minutes and my little
Tamogotchi style dinosaur straight up died on me. I am not quite over that just yet,
I mean good job, but also how could you do this to me…
Despite the name, the inspiration for Alone in the Dark is actually Dishonored,
with enemies that use a basic finite state machine that react to local stimulus when
they see or hear the player. Meanwhile the player can avoid being spotted, hide in particular areas,
dodge traps and use items to create distractions or straight up kill the enemy. There's a lot
going on here and it's really well done. Super impressive stuff, go give it a shot!
Looking back on the jam personally, there's some highs and lows. It's great to see new people
participate and once again the games submitted are fantastic. I'm really blown away by the hard work
of so many people. But there were some logistical hurdles, notably in that we ran the jam 5 months
later than we did last year. I simply had too much going on in life in order to conceivably prep and
host the game jam in the Spring, and I think that impacted numbers given the summer is a good time
to host it. We only had around 1/4 of the sign ups this year, though I think that was due to
a lot of groups only having one registration. Fortunately the drop in games was only around
50%. So less signups, but more games per signup, so that was cool. But hey, these are minor gripes
as we still had lots of participants who clearly enjoyed the experience, and I call this a win.
As before, I'm taking feedback on this as I hope we can run another event in 2023 and continue
to support the community to do fun and crazy things. I mean if anything it's a great excuse
for people to come together and make awesome things. I mean we really can't argue with that
now can we? Thanks once again to everyone who participated, be it those who made their games,
supported others in our Discord server, our jaminators for moderating the chat feeds,
our players on itch.io who came on board to try out and rate all of the games. It's a huge effort
required from a lot of people and I hope you all had a great time. Plus of course a thank
you to the Patreon community who are the drivers behind this event taking place to begin with,
and of course for their continued support in all things AI and Games.
With that, it's time to wrap up this video. If you haven't tried out the games yet but
fancy giving it a shot, the jam page continues to stay live over on itch.io and our free to
try out at any time. Plus if you want to see more of my time spent trying out these games,
head on over to my second channel where I have prepared a longplay video of each game
that I played with my reacting to them as I go. Apologies to anyone whose game
I haven't played yet. Hopefully I can carve out some time do to so soon. And with that,
programming will resume as normal starting with our next video as we get back to
looking at the inner workings behind some of your favourite games. Take care folks.
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