PlayPen73

PlayPen73 is a sandbox game with foraging, cute creatures, and mini games!

Collect as many Gems as you can through foraging, pet collection, and mini-game high-scoring. Use the gems to fund research to identify and log blurbs for up to 73 kinds of rare diseases.  In addition to that, gems can be used to adopt pets and craft things.

Pets that you adopt will forage for valuable goods that you can collect for gems. They will also add +1 ammo to mini games for each pet, allowing you to score more loot!

PlayPen73 also features an AI-driven robot assistant that starts with a blank slate and learns to help out based on your actions. Though to be honest, they are a bit of a slow learner :P

CONTROLS:

Mouse to Interact. Single clicks work on everything except the bowling ball, which requires a Click and drag on the ball

WASD or Arrows to Pan Camera

Scroll Wheel to Zoom Camera

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Developer Notes

All design, programming, 3D assets or other game assets of any kind were *not* AI-generated, everything was made by me. The self-learning model that the robot in the game uses is also created by me, which I felt was the most appropriate way to honor the theme as a creative.

However, there was some generation still used in the process, the accuracy of in-game translation is AI-proofread, which made it much faster to turn all my english text into an acceptable translation for other languages. I used DeepL for this.

This game was made for the Patient73 Game Jam '24, with love.

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If for some reason you read this far, I want to note my experience attempting to make my game with AI tools: I don't think they're ready. I am skeptical about the use of generative AI, and the ethics of it as well, so at the beginning of the jam, I had to try my best to keep an open mind. I went with an optimistic approach and tried to use some texture generating tools, tried to have it write code, etc..

Well, I found that it was mostly useless. The textures were cursed and the code was poorly written, even with many, many iterations that required a lot of my patience. If you have the skills necessary to get the job done, AI is not going to do anything to help you. I like to think of it as a kind of a fun, gimmicky learning tool, a search engine that talks to you, and sometimes, a very useful debugging tool. There isn't much beyond that within my grasp, it seems.