Legend has it that King Shahrazad was cruel and suspicious by nature. He killed the queen who betrayed him, and from then on he married his bride every night and killed her at dawn. In order to stop the atrocities, the minister's daughter Shahrazad volunteered to marry and used stories to attract the king, which she told for one thousand and one nights.
You must have heard this ancient folk story: If you were Scheherazade, how would you make yourself see the sun the next day?
1001 Nights, a narrative game that lets an AI play the role of king, developed by independent studio Ada Eden, has already set the stage for us.
But your mission is no longer to influence the king and live with him forever, but to turn your words into a blade and pierce his heart.
We tried the game's Steam Demo and had a chat with Cheese, the head of Ada Eden and the main creator of "1001 Nights".
She graduated from the Academy of Fine Arts, Tsinghua University, and is currently studying for a doctorate in the UK. She likes chatting with game NPCs and voice assistants, and has a special liking for chatbots. She started designing AI dialogue games from GPT-2. From "1001 Nights" and Cheese, we can see another way of getting along with AI.
Defeat the AI-played Daddy King
In the setting of "1001 Nights", the player plays the role of Scheherazade, telling stories to the king. The king, driven by the large language model (GLM), will take over and continue the player's story.
In the battle, players need to induce the king to say key words such as knife, sword, shield, etc., turn the weapons into entities, collect all 4 weapons, defeat the king, and complete revenge.
Because of AI, weapon cards, scenes, battle lines and other content are all generated in real time and determined by the story content. This is one of the fun things about the game - every story and every weapon is unique.
Note that the scene changes with the card.
At the same time, the prompts stipulate that the king is arrogant and irritable, advocates military conquest, and likes stories that match his personality. Players summarize that he is "very daddy-like", always stealing the pen from them and tampering with the direction of the story according to his preferences.
Therefore, the king will not be easily deceived. If the player's story is illogical, too modern for him to understand, or deliberately mentions weapons and the motives are obvious, he is likely to lose patience. When patience drops to zero, Scheherazade will be killed.
Should we tell the story according to the king's temper, or force the king to tell a story he doesn't want to hear? This is the freedom of each player, and also the game between humans and AI.
Cheese said that some players would try their best to make the king accept the love story even though they knew it was impossible. "If you really want to maintain your own story, then you need to spend more time dealing with him and convincing him."
Practice has shown that sometimes offending the king can actually make you see more of the human side of AI.
I told the king the plot of the e-sports novel, but he was obviously impatient and didn't try to understand. Perhaps after traveling through time and space, this king also thinks that games are poisonous.
When I talked about the "Bixie Sword Manual" in Jin Yong's novel, in which "the king becomes the master of martial arts and castrates himself with the sword", the king became even more furious. He could not tolerate anyone challenging his masculine authority.
If you are worried about not being able to figure out the king's character, there is a little trick to pass the level - turn the tables and let the king tell us a story. He will most likely say the key words of the weapons on his own initiative.
Cheese observed this phenomenon. She could actually impose some restrictions, but seeing that everyone was having "quite a lot of fun" and posting about it on social media such as Xiaohongshu, then it's not a bad idea.
However, there are not many weapons available in "1001 Nights", which may limit the player's performance - including the easter eggs, mainly these weapon types behind the king, swords, spears, knives, shields, and axes.
Peeping at the king's weapons will also make him lose his patience
After actual testing, the bow and meteor hammer did not work, and the game would prompt the player to change strategy in time. Cheese explained that each weapon needed to be modeled and animated, and the art department was too busy to handle it, so more would be added in the future.
After collecting all 4 weapons, the player will enter the battle interface, fight with the king for a few rounds, and then execute him on the spot.
At the end of each game, a record will be generated, summarizing the story, weapons, and ending, and giving Scheherazade a middle school title that matches the story.
The conventional routine to pass the game is to mention weapons in a convenient way, such as talking about war, but what impressed Cheese were those unexpected stories, such as Qin Shi Huang, Harry Potter, the Ming Dynasty, the Chinese language test in the college entrance examination, and the legend of Shawarma...
There are also players who have learned a lot of knowledge and ask the king to help them play "The Sultan's Game". This is also a game based on "One Thousand and One Nights" with card elements. Players explain the rules to the king and let the king make decisions.
Cheese found that it was a bit difficult to make up a complete story from scratch, but many players could do it. They could retell familiar stories or game plots to the king. She thought this was very interesting. The story the king continued to write might be a divine prophecy, or it might be very different from the original story.
One of the players told the king "Legend of Zhen Huan". At the beginning, the king put himself in the story and asked the player if he was satirizing himself for being heartless and disloyal. But as the story went on, the king could still predict the direction of the plot of "Legend of Zhen Huan".
AI developers cannot fully control the AI's behavior and cannot exhaust all the ways players can talk to the AI. Players themselves cannot decide the direction of the story and do not know whether they can convince the AI.
Perhaps the most wonderful thing about communicating with AI is the intricate possibilities.
It is the responsibility of AI-native games to tell players how AI is used
Obviously, AI plays a key role in "1001 Nights". In an atmosphere where people are afraid of AI, especially in the art and gaming circles where Cheese is, some controversial voices are inevitable.
"The artist won't use the AI 'corpse', will he? I won't play games that use cancer." "Will they use my dialogue to train the AI?" "Will it infringe on the rights of other artists?" Cheese understands the players' panic when facing AI. "1001 Nights" is a game about creation, and the players who are attracted to it often have their own persistence in creation.
Foreign artists may be more resistant to AI. Cheese joked that when giving speeches abroad, especially when communicating with other artists, he would first put on armor and introduce himself as an art student to let the other party know that he is "not a bad person."
Cheese is both an artist and an AI researcher. She actually knows best how to use AI to save effort, but she took a more difficult path: finding a scale for using AI to balance the effects required by the game and the emotions of the outside world.
Ada Eden explains how to use AI
The fixed plot and NPC dialogues of "1001 Nights" are pre-written. All the static, traditional game art assets in the game, including characters, scenes, CG, UI, etc., are also made by human artists.
However, the parts that cannot be pre-made can only be generated by AI in real time, including the text of the king's reply to the player, as well as weapon cards and scenes that vary from person to person.
Therefore, Cheese defines "1001 Nights" as an AI-native game: the core gameplay is implemented with generative AI. Without AI, the game mechanism cannot be established.
Currently, the king's replies, battle lines and other texts are generated using Zhipu's GLM model. Compared with GPT, GLM has better Chinese stability.
As for the real-time graphics such as cards and scenes, 1001 Nights only uses the team's internal art to train a dedicated style model. The AI will only generate original game styles and will not imitate other artists, ensuring the source of training materials and the security and stability of generated content. The game also obtained the authorization of the open source image processing technology Pixelization to keep the images in pixel style.
Xiaohongshu comments on "1001 Nights"
At the same time, Cheese has been thinking about how to make the use of AI more gentle, reduce potential problems, and be more acceptable to everyone.
In Cheese's words, "Anything that a human creator can do, we do by hand."
Cheese doesn't know whether this is a standard answer or a good approach, but she believes that a game that focuses on creation should at least present a clear attitude and explain to players how to use AI. "This is part of the game's responsibility."
From papers to independent games, using AI as storytelling material
Every unrealized idea is waiting for a ripe time.
"1001 Nights" has been in development since 2020, earlier than ChatGPT, which will make AI dialogue a daily habit. Cheese's interest in AI dialogue games has a longer history.
Since she was a child, Cheese has liked games with large amounts of text, such as visual novels. She likes reading the copy in the game and especially likes chatting with NPCs (non-player characters), although she also knows that these are all written in advance.
In 2011, the emergence of Apple's voice assistant Siri made Cheese feel even more novel. Siri interacted with people using natural language, and the conversations were more flexible than those of NPCs. She even wondered if this technology could be used on NPCs.
When he was an undergraduate at Tsinghua Academy of Fine Arts, Cheese decided to design a chatbot. However, at that time, the general perception of AI was that it was "stupid". Most people had no expectations for talking to AI, and they didn't think it was worth doing, "because the most people had ever come into contact with was Siri."
But Cheese believes that designing chatbots is very similar to designing game characters. They don’t have to be very smart. As long as they show some humanity, they are also very interesting. During her undergraduate and master’s studies, she made many strange chatbots, including "1001 Nights".
Looking back over the past four years, the development of "1001 Nights" has accurately hit the beat of technology.
At first, "1001 Nights" was an assignment for Cheese Master's game course, and the first version of the demo was released at the end of 2020. At that time, GPT-2, "ChatGPT's grandmother", was used, which had limited computing power and poor results. After feeding it a short story, it could barely speak human language in English, and then the player told the story.
At the end of 21, Cheese contacted Caiyun Technology. Caiyun Xiaomeng, a subsidiary of this company, is an intelligent writing AI. The user starts a story and it can continue writing it, which perfectly meets Cheese's needs. The game has since received attention, published its first paper, and was invited to exhibit in an art gallery. The team also made a device that can print out stories, which players love.
2021, early 1001 games and installations
But the king at this time was still not smart enough and could only perform a single task: telling stories. He had no way of judging the quality of the players' stories, nor could he judge whether the players were cursing him. However, even though the gameplay was basic, many players were willing to invest in the game "because they felt it was very rewarding."
This verified Cheese's idea and responded to her original conception of the chatbot - although the technology has limitations, generating stories in a generative way is a game mechanism that encourages players to create.
At the end of 2022, ChatGPT was released, and then various large models gradually came out, and many problems were naturally solved. AI is no longer just a continuation machine, but a king with personality. "As long as the prompt words are written correctly, it can basically act according to my design."
At the same time, the Wenshengtu model is also maturing. Cheese feels that the time has come and "1001 Nights" can be developed into a complete independent game and downloaded and played by more people.
In early 2023, Cheese established the studio Ada Eden, named after the world's first programmer Ada Lovelace. There are about 10 members, including programmers, planners, artists, and musicians. Basically, they are "friends met online" who squeeze out their spare time to make games.
Team members
Unlike ordinary game teams, every member of Ada Eden has to understand something about AI. Not only programmers, but planners also have to cooperate in writing some prompts, tuning the AI, ensuring that the generated content is logical, and maintaining the style of the game.
The pixel-style art style of "1001 Nights" was also determined from the beginning because Cheese himself likes pixel games very much. "I have played many games, so I like the pixel style, and it will also attract players with the same aesthetic."
In 2020, "1001 Nights" did not involve AI-generated images. However, Cheese had a vague feeling at the time that the pixel style could well accommodate generative art content, so he continued to use it and really entered the era of AI generation.
The idea was born out of interest, and the product was continuously polished due to the development of technology, from pure text to multimodal generation. Today, "1001 Nights" is somewhat like the product of the perfect conclusion of the world line.
Ada Eden has been invited to various exhibitions, including the Cologne Games Show in 2024. It recently completed an exhibition in Dortmund, Germany
The release of ChatGPT had an additional benefit for Cheese - she finally didn't have to explain what she was doing.
In the past, when Cheese introduced herself, she would say, "I'm an artist, but I make chatbots." People might still be confused, but now, she can just say, "Let's play this game of talking to AI."
AI dialogue games are actually a very large category, and there have been some hits, such as "Yandere Cat Girl AI Girlfriend", in which the player convinces his AI girlfriend to let him go out, and "Suck Up!", in which the player plays the role of a vampire and tricks the NPC into opening the door.
Suck Up!
But 1001 Nights is another type. In Cheese's opinion, it is more like writing.
The original version of the story of One Thousand and One Nights is that Scheherazade and the king finally got married, but this ending confused the young Cheese. The king was obviously an unforgivable sinner, so why did he have a clichéd happy ending?
"1001 Nights" solves this puzzle in the form of an AI dialogue game, allowing players to tell one story after another and change the original reality.
On October 24, 1001 Nights released a free demo on Steam, but the demo only showed less than 20% of the basic gameplay of the official version. The animation after the demo was completed also hinted that just surviving one night was not enough.
Cheese revealed that in the official version, the storyline and tasks will be richer, and the heroine will go back in time and work with the girl who died before. What she wants to do is a complete narrative game with different chapters.
As an art student studying AI, Cheese has been asked by many people, "Will painters lose their jobs?" and has heard many grand narratives about "AI replacing humans." She understands everyone's concerns, but is also dissatisfied with the current situation that has created this impression. "The current technology lacks supervision and is often abused, which has created a negative impression of AI."
But she also knows that her views cannot represent those of other artists and creators. She can only do her best to let everyone see the interesting side of AI applications and "contribute a little unique voice to technical discussions."
Scheherazade in "1001 Nights" tries to change the fate arranged by the king. She is angry and does not accept it. She wants to tell her own story. At the same time, the story she tells is initiated by humans. Without players, there will be no such a lot of beautiful stories.
Cheese hopes that "1001 Nights" can make players realize that AI can be played in this way, and that the stories it tells and the plots it creates can have meaning in the game.
She has been "tinkering" with AI for a long time, and will continue to do so, answering more specific questions in her mind - how to use AI to create good works, bring unprecedented experiences, and even give people intellectual satisfaction. "AI is a special material for storytelling, and I firmly believe in this. It is precisely because technology is developing so fast that good stories will be as clear and precious as crystal."
This article comes from the WeChat public account "APPSO" , the author is: Discover Tomorrow's Products, and is authorized to be published by 36Kr.
