Shutong Ji

Nightmare Company

Draw Monsters that intrude into children’s dreams

Overview

You play as the head of a contracting company of demons who gain power by harvesting children’s nightmares. You need to utilize your ability to bring monster drawings to life. The scarier the monster is, the more mana you gain,  absorbing as much power as you can!

Play on Itch.io

Moreover, this Itch.io version is a continuation by other members in the team. They expand the game to a coop-competitive game. However, the core concept of LLM usage still remain the same.

Gameplay

  • Target Profiling:

    Every night, players receive a child “target” with a profile detailing their vague fears (categories like “primal fear,” “insects”), their joy triggers (what they find funny), and specific design constraints (like only can use black and white colors).

  • Monster Creation:

    Players would draw a monster on the canvas and write a brief “Scare Strategy” describing how the creature intrudes upon the dream.

  • The Terror Metric: 

    An LLM evaluates both the drawing and the text against the child’s profile to determine the “Horror Scale.”

  • The Ink Pot:

    High horror ratings reward players with “Inks”. These are the essential resources required to create more terrifying monsters for future levels.

Check your target profiles
Check your target profiles
Draw and Write Monster Design
Draw and Write Monster Design
Monster shows up in front of a house
Monster shows up in front of a house
Sneak into the house
Sneak into the house
Check the scare results
Check the scare results
Accepting restrictions
Accepting restrictions

LLM Engineering

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

The Judge:

  • This prompt would be utilized to process visual input, textual input, and the target profile for judging the horror scale of the player-created monster.
  • It will then return the value of the horror scale.

Scare Image:

  • It will analyze the fear score from the Judge and combine it with the players’ creations to generate a text description of what happens inside the dream. Did the monster cause the child to have lifetime PTSD, or it was laughed by the child?

The game didn’t stop here. After I finished the first version of the game, other members in the team continued to expand the game, making it into a multiplayer coop-competitive game, which now LLM will interpret players’ drawings and generate an image of children being scared of/laughing at the monster.