First alpha tester today… about to soft-launch, I think…
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Wow, congratulations.
How long have you been building on that?
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Thanks!
I started here 8 short weeks ago…
Although, I’ve been thinking about this for a couple years now, waiting for AI Dungeon to release something. It didn’t turn out the way I imagined, but it’s kinda better in some ways? I had to scale back the scope a lot, but I’m hoping there’s enough interest (financially heh) that I can continue working on it and still afford oatmeal.
GPT-4 helped so much along the way… was worth the money for the time saved…
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Hey Man, if you are looking for assets, there is a roguelike on Google Play called “Yet Another Pixel Dungeon”. The guy has all of the assets and code on github. It was a mod of a different pixel dungeon game on google play. Also available on github and linked in the README. I’d play the game real quick, get some ideas, and use the art.
Yet Another Pixel Dungeon - GitHub Assets
Yet Another Pixel Dungeon - Google Play
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Thanks!
I’ve been playing roguelikes for a while now… I’ve also written a Roguelike novel…
Pixel Dungeon (and its other versions) are pretty sweet, for sure.
I’m making my own art with DALLE2 and trying to be a little different.
I appreciate the input, tho!
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No worries. I’ve been making games for quite a while now and I always use placeholder items first then replace everything when i have the time.
In a couple of your posts you had made a couple commemts like other people being quite a bit ahead doing similar things and “not much to do”. Thats the only reason I suggested.
But seems you got it locked down, so no worries. Ill definitely be keeping an eye out. Looks like a pretty cool project.
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Thanks. No worries. Sorry if I came off a bit defensive of my baby. Haha…
It’s been a crazy 8 weeks putting this together. I know it’s nowhere near completed (where I want it to be), but gamedev is a marathon not a sprint. 
Definitely a work in progress…
I do appreciate you taking the time to comment. Are you working with AI on your gamedev at all?
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I’m not working on anything specific for games right now. I run a company that does contract work. We were doing web3 stuff but all of our customers want AI stuff now and we happened to have experience in both of them. We haven’t run across anyone in games wanting it yet, but I do dream about it everyday xD. But, as you know, games development is rough, and players are needy and mean. So we (my brother and I) don’t do too many side projects around games anymore.
We are building out a full kit that allows for multiple subsystems that you can run locally. Speech analysis, voice synthesis, LLM agents, etc. I’m sure there is a niche where we can run something as a service so integration into games is easy. Right now everything is RESTful API style, so game devs could easily get started using it if we were running it as a service. I would definitely like to work with game devs, indie or otherwise, but we aren’t planning on making any games ourselves.
But, as a nerd and a sympathizer of the indie experimenter, I’m definitely rooting for you. There was a game called Dwarf Fortress that I loved but was only in ascii, the creators just recently made a full professional 8bit version on steam. So I’m hoping yours gets some traction like that.
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Yeah the costs/pricing is a big problem now without proper nano-transaction fees… I have a credit system on LitRPG Adventures that I’ve been using for the tabletop tools, so I’m sure I can hook it up to the roguelike and maybe do a freemium version with a monthly sub.
I keep being reminded of arcades costing $0.25 per play! Then came the cutting edge games with $0.50 per play or more! And then that whole industry crashed. Other games have online subs, though, so I’m cautiously optimistic that I can rustle up a couple thousand interested souls.
Your project does indeed sound interesting for a gamedev. Are you more on the technical side, then? There’s definitely a lot of people looking for AI-anything right now.
I always smile when I remember the drunk cats problem in Dwarf Fortress. Haha.
Thanks again.
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Yeah I am definitely more technical end, specifically backend and enterprise like solutions. As for monetization, maybe you can have like a loot box every N levels or something. Cost like $0.25 to open it, the loot is random, but it can be special loot that you can start fresh games with. Players get really crazy with the loot boxes.
Here is a market place for just skins only.
CS:GO Marketplace | DMarket
I imagine since you already have Dalle-2 Integrated you can definitely make some really nice random loot for people, maybe even generate random stats, names, and effects for weapons. That I think would make them more valuable.
These are from Midjourney, but once you get a nice template down, you can just keep generating new ones pretty easily. Possibly something similar can be done with Stable Diffusion/Dalle for weapons and loot.
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New update… running out of funds/time bootstrapping this, but I’m loving how it’s turning out!
I have an idea for micro-transaction fees to pay for the chat and some of the other generative AI features… more on that soon, I hope…
When the ChatGPT Shopkeeper NPC Gets Angry, this happens!
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Nice. I think I’m going to have in-game credits you can buy with my LitRPG Adventures credits. The latter are about a penny per credit, so I’m going more granular with the in-game tokens that will be bought with the LitRPG Adventures credits… they will power the chat (x tokens for y chat sessions/rounds)… and other generative AI features… wish me luck! (And thanks for the input. It’s appreciated…)
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Always happy to see dev updates from LitRPG!
About the monetization:
The credit system you describe sounds very fair from a developer perspective, but a bit confusing from a user perspective. Adding loot box mechanics and micro transactions will only make that worse.
Have you considered making Patreon account so that people can donate you money?
There will be a few whale’s who are willing to donate you lots of money, and a lot of players who want to pay zero dollars for playing your game, because they don’t know what it is until they try it.
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@PaulBellow Actually patreon is a good route until you get some traction, maybe drop tokens in their account every month as the first teir.
As for this comment. This is actually not too confusing if you do it right. Many mobile games implement this style. You’ll have the free-to-play currency, gold or something you earn in the game. Then you will have the premium currency, diamonds or rubies, which you pay for or earn through revenue generating activity (like ad views or season passes).
He’ll have to find something that sticks with the type of gameplay he is building out, but it’s a pretty proven model that players seem to accept.
But I think you are right about the patreon. It will be good for the people who want to support but don’t necessarily have the time to play enough to generate income and or contribute to beta testing (me for example).
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I’ve got three people on my Patreon so far haha…
I don’t like the idea of loot boxes… I doubt donations would pay for everything, though, so I need to find a middle ground - and, like you said, make it easy / seamless for the player.
I do have a “lifetime” LitRPG Adventures account and my normal monthly subs, but I’ve not been able to crack $1k/month… my own fault … So, I have the payment system set up on the site and working for 2 years now… just need better marketing to get people in the door…
Yeah, a lot of that is super predatory to make you not realize how much you’re actually spending in game haha… I’m thinking like 25 credits (about a quarter USD) to start the game then if you run out of CHAT POINTS or whatever, you can pop another quarter in and go for another X hours/turns…???
The gameplay loop (so far) is a basic traditional turn-based roguelike… but with tiles instead of ascii…
I’ll keep thinking on it. I do think some people are very interested and more would be if I could get the attention of a gaming journalist haha…
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I fully agree with this:
I’m about more cautious about agreeing with this:
Only some players seem to accept this model of monetization, and there’s a lot of people who also dislike it, that was also my point about whales.
For this sorta monetization scheme to work you’ll need a free version too 
I like your point about Patreon:
Especially this:
Maybe that could also solve some of Paul’s problems
Patreon even has an API, so it should be fairly simple to do this, here’s the link to the docs:
https://docs.patreon.com/#introduction
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I mean, Patreon takes a cut, though. If they sign-up on my site for a monthly sub, I’m better off int he long-run, I think?
The Freemium account would have maybe 50 or 100 credits - enough for 1 to 4 games - but restricted so that you can only go down to level X and only chat so many times… then paid monthly subs would have hundreds more credits and be able to play longer… that’s the plan, anyway…
I just need to find a friend of a friend who has a friend who is a gaming journalist haha…
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A couple of years ago I was in a decentralized gaming blockchain group where we would give each other tips and tricks for business or development ideas.
I did a postmortem of our game launch and I think you might get some use out of it @PaulBellow. But we kind of went through the same process of what you are going through now. Might be useful. Our second launch was way better, we made about $54k between crypto fluctuation and user purchases and in only 2 and a half months.
We ended up shutting down the studio because I could make like 4 times that just getting a normal job. But it was still a good experience and something I apply to a lot of the products I make now days.
Making sense of blockchain gaming business models (with Mud Hero Studios) - YouTube
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You can just reach out to them directly. Cold emails pretty much. I worked at a startup and our marketing guy mentioned that it is pretty successful if you are running it by a journalist who has a history on the particular topic and it is currently trendy to talk about it. It is good for their portfolio.
So you basically just do a search for “AI in video games” or whatever on the internet and then dig deep into the top 5 pages and find the authors. Requires some footwork, but it seems to work pretty well.
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