Echoes of Somewhere

Intermission, sweet rolls and hot drinks in the cafeteria!

After working on the adventure game at the side of my day job for well over a full year, I built a quick little prototype car combat game over one weekend. But building that game was so much fun, that I kept at it!

After that weekend, I have not had the time to focus on 2 side projects, meaning that the adventure game has stalled for a bit while I have been working on this other fun project. Also, I did not know how much I loved vehicular combat, as all my personal projects had always been point and click adventures (which is. genre I still deeply love!)

The vehicular combat game I am working on does not use generative AI, we went as far as creating the splash screen for the game using oil paints! I think I got what I wanted from my experimentation with generative AI art and needed to focus on something else for a while. On something “real”.

This does not mean that Echoes of Somewhere is dead, no. It is just on a holiday! The vehicular combat game is advancing at a rocket speed (thanks to chat GPT!) and after I am done with that I will get back to echoes to finish the story of the lone janitor, a lone protagonist facing the perils of the AI powered future!

In Drivers, I use Chat GPT to help with the programming. Instead of relying on scouring the Unity forums or google for C# tips, I decided to see how much would asking ChatGPT speed up the process. And speed up it did!! I am a decent amateur programmer. I am confident that I can create a single player game of pretty much any type all by myself. But armed with chat GPT no task is too complicated and the simple tasks get lightning fast!

The most amazing thing I was able to accomplish, in my opinion, is the procedurally generating endless terrain. It took a lot of planning, careful design and hours and hours of working with ChatGPT and Claude, but finally the game has a terrain with props both big and small and support for real world height maps that can go on for ever and ever AND is performant. Quite amazing!

Features that got more or less help from chat GPT:

• Enemy vehicle obstacle avoidance
• Enemy vehicle management
• Targeting
• Terrain generation
• Inventory system
• Loot system
• Mission selection
• Dialogue manager
• Weapon systems
• Destruction

Having an art background, I would have never been able to finish any of these features without having unrestricted access to a relentless programming mentor who was able to answer all my questions and explain everything to me in a way that I would understand.

Apart from being able to solve more complex problems, AI was truly helpful in speeding up the tedious processes. Simple code could now be written by just providing Chat GPT a spine of the code as inline comments and I would get full code back without having to spend ages typing everything myself. When I provided this skeleton of a code, the resulting C# would almost always work without any changes.

This is not to say the system was perfect! Far from it. Quite often AI systems got tangled up on too long code. And quite often they were unable to create a solution completely and I would then have to figure it out myself. But what it was helpful with was shoving me in the right direction. Giving me a very solid hint on what problems to solve and how.

One of the biggest things AI was of no use was the enemy AI for steering. It simply made the cars run in circles. But after I had built the steering system myself, Chat GPT o1 was able to make the obstacle avoidance code I had made into something that is actually serviceable (still needs work for reversing when bumping against and unstoppable wall).

The new GPT o1 is a lot better at figuring out solutions to problems than 4o was, but it has this nasty habit of changing my code here and there, not only where I need it to. So I often need to manually add only the edits to my code I want. Even when I then paste it my working code, when it does another edit, it will revert the full code back to how it had made it before I pasted in my code. Quite annoying, but even still faster than typing everything in manually.

During this process I have also learned to program a lot better myself as well! After working with pretty complex bits for the game with ChatGPT, like the inventory system, I no understand how such a feature is made and have been able to make it better and create new inventory system like systems for the game completely un-aided! Which I think is awesome!

Drivers of the Apocalypse does not have a devblog – yet, but I am posting my progress on my twitter quite regularly!

If you want to find out more, visit the project website at https://www.driversoftheapocalypse.com