I’m a complete newbie–more of a writer than a game designer–and I’ve been trying to create a Detective game where the fiction is mostly on rails; however, the dialogue is using AI in order to test the player’s persuasive skills. You have to figure out the best way to get the characters to spill what they know in order to progress. Mostly, I was inspired by Facade and Suck Up! Of course, I know people are reasonably wary of all things AI. All of the writing of the story is mine; it’s just the dialogue where I bring in the robots.
Anyway, I’m curious about whether other writers have used AI in this way or have any advice about how to create interactive fiction that focuses on persuasive skills.
The game I think I’ve played that is most similar to that is an older one from 2023 called The Fortuna:
That game is about a student who wins a trip on a cruise ship and has to talk to cruise members. (I’m actually surprised it’s still running; it’s been up for years and looks like it uses a paid service called Crisp).
More recently, someone made a mystery sci fi game that was just an AI prompt (where the prompt was also written by AI): Penny Nichols, Troubleshooter - Details
This game had the issue (in the AI service I tried it under) that it gave away the prompt really quickly, so you couldn’t have any mystery because the ai agent wanted to bring up all the
secrets in the prompt right away (for instance, a doctor was actually a hologram instead of a person. The AI immediately, right when you saw him, said ‘he flickers, like he’s not really there.’)
If you’re serious about this, there are a couple of obstacles.
1-Breadth/scope. When you write dialogue by hand, the only text is what you write, so you start small and build it up until it’s interesting. With AI, it starts really broad with tons of dialogue options that are irrelevant or even damaging to your game. It can hallucinate new clues or suspects or change genres. If you can chain it down with very strict guardrails, then it could be serviceable. I don’t have any examples of someone doing this well.
2-Preservation. AI is a resource-intensive project designed to make money, and isn’t focused on archival. While you may not worry about your game sticking around, the IF community still plays games from years past, and many times authors come back decades later and are glad to see people revisiting their work. If yours depends on an AI service, it may not last long depending on pricing and service changes.
3-A lot of people have ethical and/or quality objections to AI. And, frankly, most of the AI-related games in this community have been awful. Some have successfully snuck in some ai-expanded text into middlingly-well-received games, but it’s unlikely that you’ll receive praise or esteem from more than 1 or 2 people on here. If that’s not your goal, though, I wouldn’t worry about it.
There are games that pretty much do what you’ve described on these forums with community feedback for your review…
→ Amara
→ DetectivesGame
My only advice is that it’s really hard to make the dialog not feel like a chat-bot AND keep the AI focused only on sharing information and not agreeing to things that the game doesn’t support. With the sycophantic nature of LLMs, that’s a tall order.