I’ve really enjoyed making the 2D games that populate the arcade so far but I wanted to explore making something with a little more “depth”, get it? The third D, and the first of the D’s that starts with the letter D? Interesting.

Our adventures in length and height as the constraints produced Crosswire, 8-Bit Gambit, and Paddler’s Paradise. All great games and fun to explore, each with its own merits and charms. In continuing to build games based on things I enjoy, the next logical step was to create an off road experience where you can feel like you’re really behind the wheel of a monster rig bouncing over rocks and crawling up mountains.

While you can get the feel of being behind the wheel in a 2D setting (Nintendo and Atari proved this with racing games in the 80s and 90s; Nintendo’s R.C. Pro-Am was even a radio-controlled car racer, back in 1988) to really experience the terrain you need to go 3D. But how do you do that? Ask your AI?

Achieving Unity With Unity

Unity, for those outside the gaming world, is a piece of software, free for personal use, that allows a user to create complex 3D worlds and incorporate game mechanics programmed in C# (a coding language). Unity has its own editor and its own way of doing things that can take weeks to learn and years to master. But there’s a not-so-secret back door (it’s in the manual, but hardly anyone goes looking) that an AI can use, a Command Line Interface (CLI for short). This CLI allows my AI to talk directly to the core of the Unity system and build worlds without me even opening the software. Amazing!

But Wait There’s More, Check Out This Blender

Blenders aren’t just for making soups and sauces, apparently they can also help create 3D models for computer-generated worlds. Who knew? Blender is another free to use software package that also has a CLI that AI systems can work with. Blender can create 3D objects and environments, display complex lighting and iterate quickly!

With Blender and Unity both installed on my computer a simple command to CLU can land a working prototype of a 3D game in under forty minutes. Unreal - no wait that’s a different software… And so it was, CLU was given the off roading game in a nutshell and asked to make a sample for me to mould. Not long after, I was driving a goofy little truck (at that point, literally a box) around a map. Simple, but rooooughh…

This is where a lot of AI slop stops: a janky game lands on an app store, and a cool thumbnail plus some misleading screenshots get people to drop 99 cents on a pile of unfinished nonsense. We’re not going to do that, are we, team? NO! We’re going to iterate, we’re going to imagine, and we’re going to improve. As of the time of writing, we’re on version 0.6.2 of 4 Wheel’n Freedom. We’ve made 69 rulings along the way — modifications, tweaks, and in some cases major overhauls to functionality, look, feel, and control of the game. Nearly every one came from trial and re-trial, discussion and testing. Even with all the changes, the game is still far from complete, but it’s good enough to be made available for free, right? Thus another game lands in the Arcade. Free now, free always.

But You Didn’t Learn

A common criticism of using AI to do things for you is giving up the learning process. While using the Command Line Interfaces within Unity and Blender means I don’t see the builds happening or understand yet how it all works, I do get to learn all about game design. I’m learning what makes games interesting, what types of 3D elements work together, how traveling through a 3D world can have unforeseen issues. Should I be required to know how the software works in order to turn the key? Do you know how your car was built and how the engine works, the brakes, the emissions system (ok maybe you do but you probably work in a garage)? If you don’t know the inner workings of a car does that make you unqualified to drive it? I would guess most would say no. I may not know how the software works but I’m learning very quickly how to drive it!

Don’t let AI replace you, your creativity, your desire to learn new things. Use AI to explore, to imagine, to fascinate yourself.

-Evrtek