Shutong Ji

Word Bullet Hell

Catch word bullets and form sentences

Overview

You play as someone trying to navigate through life while struggling to put your thoughts together. Whether it is trying to find love or convince your boss of a raise, communicating can be difficult. Your brain can easily become spaghetti. In this chaotic word bullet hell, you will be trying to formulate coherent thoughts by determining which words you want to get hit by to build your thoughts and ideas.

Play on Itch.io

Gameplay

The player navigates a screen filled with word and emoji projectiles.

  • Sentence Building: Instead of typing, players must physically collide with specific “word bullets” to fill their response slots.
  • Fragment-Based Input: Once the slots are filled, the game sends these fragments to an LLM “translation layer”, or the “Caveman”.
  • Punctuation Difference: Punctuation would be very important in how the conversions would occur. For example, “me hungry!” would turn into “I am super hungry,” versus “me hungry?” could turn into “Am I hungry?”
The game will switch between collecting word phase and NPC responding phase, driving the narrative forward
You are on a date!
You are on a date!
Collect Word Bullets
Collect Word Bullets
Translate by LLM
Translate by LLM
Makes your date sad
Makes your date sad
Or cheer them up!
Or cheer them up!

LLM Engineering

This project utilizes a three-tier LLM architecture to transform chaotic player actions into structured narrative data.

Caveman:

  • This would be utilized to take the fragmented sentence the player has created and then convert it into a proper sentence to be utilized by the player.

Chat:

  • This would be utilized to generate the conversation between the player and the NPC. It would take in the string of the player’s sentence, alongside the chat history of the previous conversation, and then return a string of the NPC’s response.

Word Generation:

  • As players talk to NPCs, plots can go into totally unexpected routes. To ensure word bullets are still relevant and can push the conversation further, we need this Word Generation Engine to provide more words.
  • It will take in descriptions of the scenario the player is in, and all relevant information about it. Then, output a list of relevant Word objects that are helpful for future conversations.