I Made A Before And After Video Game And It's Terrible
Whatever you're thinking, it's worse than that
Look, I know we all hate AI and I get it. As a writer, it’s particularly odious to think of my work being minced and fed into a machine, which then regurgitates a macerated parody of creation. It’s even more galling to think that it might shit out something better than I can write.
I get it. Let’s get together and smash the weaving frames.
But, I was browsing on the socials the other week and I saw that Grok was doing quite a good job of churning out custom video games. Huh, I thought, that’s interesting. It positions the creator as more of a director - imagining the gameplay, describing the jeopardy and the outcomes, with the AI making it so.
As an entrepreneurial sort, I wondered if I could make a game based on Before and After. You have to understand that I grew up in the 1980s and book>game adaptations were all the rage. In fact film>game, board game>game anything>game adaptations were all the rage. Think I’m kidding. how about this:
So, I dusted off my coding trousers and got to work. The process was pretty simple. I drew up a laundry list of requirements and started to spec out the way that the game would work. Most of the time was spent generating 90s arcade style sprites of Ben, Carl and Brown.
This was genuinely fun to do and I’m going to have to wrestle with the ethics of using AI to generate these sort of images. I’m openly soliciting your viewpoints on this - I think it’s evil (in the sense that artists aren’t being recompensed for teaching the algo how to make these images) but I’m not 100% sure why - if it’s computer art isn’t that even more complex? Didn’t the computer make the art first? Argggh!
Opinions please.
In the meantime, let’s all adore digital 90s icon Brown!
Grok wouldn’t get that Carl wasn’t a zombie in the traditional sense and was more like a spluttering Gammon-type. It also really didn’t like doing a Lego leg. Anyway, I think I got somewhere interesting with it.
Next up was the gameplay. I had to keep it simple because AI can’t just spit out the code for a totally original first person shooter, which is a shame, because I could absolutely get with the notion of a FPS Before and After. Generally speaking I think FPS do a terrible job of having interesting protagonists, so I’ll add writing one of those to the To Do List.
My early efforts resulted in quite a lot of crashed applications and I had to spend a wee while figuring out some of the technicalities. Perhaps a qualified coder would be able to make this step go a lot smoother and come up with a better end-product. But I’d set myself a four-hour deadline to get a minimum viable product together and after that elapsed I had to laugh because it was utterly shit. Buggy, unplayable, shit. It made me laugh a lot though and that’s what I’m sharing with you now.
Brace yourself.
Whatever your expectations are, lower them by at least 7,000 percent.
Ready?
Ok, here’s the world premiere of Before and After, the videogame…
BTW, that brown rectangle that blocks Ben’s escape from the flat is a sofa. Brown sneaks underneath and flips a switch, but Ben still can’t get past.
This takes me back to the old days of the Sinclair Spectrum and classic games like Special Agent Sam (still much missed!). The images of the characters are brilliantly realised - you could be onto something here. Have you thought about teaming up with a gaming company to create something in the style of a game like The Last of Us? Interesting point about the surge of book/movie games - now it's the reverse - superb TV shows are being made based on epics - such as aforementioned The Last of Us, Fallout, Halo et.al. And I still think a dramatisation of the Before and After series would be a Top 10 on Netflix! 😃
OMG 😭 I'm so very very poorly at the minute but that 24 seconds made me laugh that hard I started choking and needed my oxygen! A + for 4 hours of work and keeping at it but oh dear! I would still play it though because I love the books and still think about 3rd should be done! There's still more to the story! The walking dead did 11 seasons and has 5 major spin offs! So let's the writing commence... please 🙏 x