I was feeling depressed last week and the start of this week wasn't much better. Things have improved though as I look forward to what I'm going to do in November.
Read
I haven't started up a new book yet and sadly a whole lot of what I read this week was social media. For whatever reason losing my Twitter account prompted me to spend lots of time looking at it and Bluesky after not reading them for over two months.
I'd like to say what I was reading on them but I find I'm really bad at remembering what I've seen on the infinite scroll of social media. It all falls out of memory as soon as I move it offscreen. I wish I could say that I was taking part in social media, liking and commenting but I always fall into only reading, no wonder my Twitter account got suspended.
I did read some online writing from the likes of Sam Kriss and QC. The former has a very engaging style and was writing about an experience at Burning Man which I'm convinced had to be embellished with fiction with how surreal it sounded. The latter likes to write about dystopias brought about by lazy AI use with his latest story being about wireheading.
Listened
Zach Wienersmith, the creator of the webcomic Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal, has a podcast he appears on called Last Humans in the Loop. It is about AI news and I listened to a few episodes finding it informative and funny. Zach has always seemed well read and unlike other creatives is really keeping up to date with advances in AI.
Watched
I enjoy watching videogame speedruns so as well as checking GDQ twice a year I also often go on speedruns.com. The latest I watched was of the RTS Supreme Commander which in my humble opinion is the pinnacle of the genre. Interesting game to see speedrun as so much of it is optimising your economy and waiting until you have just enough units to win decisively. There were some long timed missions which are a bit of shame for a speedrun.
Not only can AIs play video games they can also make videos about playing videogames as in this example of an AI writing about an AI beating Factorio. It took 4 days to do so so it won't be making a speedrun for quite some time.
An interesting AI benchmark is Runescape bench which covers all kinds of tasks within the game. There was a good talk about the benchmark here.
A silly video from Spiffing Brit about a mod for Skyrim which changes up the levelling mechanics and starts you with zero skill points and one health. As per usual he completely exploited the game ending up with ridiculous skills and defeating the toughest monster.
Programmed
Technically I didn't do any programming this week but I did experiment with getting an AI to code some little games for me. Specifically I was using Claude Sonnet 5.5 and getting it to make incremental games like what I made for Ludum Dare. In short it's gotten really good at it.
I set it the task of making one based on ancient technology and it created an incremental game where you gather food in ancient Mesopotamia, build farms and mines, research technology and advance from stone to bronze to iron age. The code it wrote even had some basic graphics for the scene and buildings. All this only took minutes to do.
The game seemed functional and reasonably fun to play. Intrigued to see what else it could do I asked it for a similar game but with animations in the scene. It created a new game which was similar but you were building a pyramid layer by layer as well as a city. It had a day night cycle and little people going to and from the pyramid building site carrying stone blocks.
Wanting to push it further I then asked it for a scene in 3D, something I've always struggled with in my own projects and it complied. Well, kind of. I actually ran out of usage on the free tier just after it finished the code so I don't know what else it might have added. Still the game did indeed have a 3D scene.
I spent some time looking through the code of the three iterations and I have to say it was kind of hard to read. The AI model probably hadn't expected the code to be read so it made it as compact and minimal as possible. Still there were some interesting things I could glean from it like the format of an svg image text description and various Three.js functions.
Played
I played a couple of Ludum Dare entries but was feeling bad about not playing more. Partly I was worried that I hadn't been quick enough to engage with the communal effort of playing games as there is an algorithm that promotes your game to other people the more you play their games. If you don't get enough reviews you don't get rated at the end of the judging period.
I needn't have worried as I discovered later in the week that whilst I had been avoiding checking the site lots of people had played my entry over the weekend and left glowing reviews. Of course I then played their games in turn and reviewed them as thanks. I'll now be getting results at the end of the judging period.
One of the people I followed on itch.io after seeing their entry on Ludum Dare released a new game and I checked it out. Its called Monkey Clicker and is an incremental game about getting monkeys to type out Shakespeare's plays. It is a perfectly serviceable incremental game going up to the silly scale of having galaxies of monkeys all typing. It very much looks like AI generated it but I'm interested in seeing what else this developer comes out with.
Other
As October comes to a close I'm feeling quite excited about November. Whilst NaNoWriMo is no longer a thing I do want to continue writing lots over the month of November like I did last year. This time as well as writing in my journal I'd also like to get some fiction done too. I'm thinking I could make an interactive fiction game out of it.
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