DESIGN,DEVELOP,REPEAT

Fire In The Sky

In the past week we had an addition to our team. With over 10 years experience in the industry and a full-stack designer, Franz comes prepared and has already contributed to our overall design and provided essential industry guidance in product development and deployment. The insights of which have shaped our approach to this month of October and the work we have planned for Radiant Assistant.

Very difficult to get a dragon constellation that doesn’t turn into a Power Rangers character.

Franz joins us at an especially critical time as we’ve begun development of our most ambitious new addition to how RA will assist its players. This has lead to whole new sections of the website needing built. Which means, lots and lots of research, discovery, feedback, and a loop of that, until we’ve drilled down to something we hope our users will genuinely love.

In other news soon to deeply impact the AI generative world is the recently announced Dall-E 3. Another significant step forward in the industry and if you look at its art results compared side by side with its progenitor Dall-E 2, given the same prompt, it achieves markedly superior results. Along with an increase in image quality comes a tool-box of other improvements certain to shift what was thought possible in the field only a short while ago.

Image Credit: OpenAI

Dall-E 3 and doubtlessley the art generators that will follow it, will now be capable of creating impressively nuanced and tonally accurate images with only conversational input. The user need not be especially specific in their phrasing and the AI can infer what it should create. “I don’t know. Give me a happy hedgehog frolicking”. That’s a joke but it was similar language that created the image below.

Image Credit: OpenAI

Objects in relation to each other is a concept the AI now grasps far better. Tell it that you want grass, adjacent to a box, adjacent to a telephone pole 10 ft away. It can do that. Gone are the days of generalized images which then required several itterations before fine tuning to what what the artist intended.

Text in image. A benchmark hurdle overcome. Art AI could not create text within image until now. The implications are obvious what an increase in creative potential this is. In other text news, another bombshell dropped. Dall-E 3 will be able to create images and then provide a creative description of that image. We at Chronicle, are patricularly interested in this detail for our own AI.

Image Credit: OpenAI - text in image, sure let’s solve that already.

If eyebrows aren’t raised now, to think what the next generation will be capable of, the adjectives to describe that are varied, and I’m betting selection is divisive. The ever faster rate at which AI is improving speaks to a next revolution. The likes of which will have no lesser a historical significance than the industrial. The fact it will likely play out in one fifth the time might also catch the attention of a few disinterested demographics.

In any event, we’d like to make sure that table-top gaming is well served by the new potential these advancements unlock.

It is plain to us that these new tools use within DND and other table-top games is not a matter of ‘if’, but ‘when’. These kinds of games are defined by their creative freedom and imaginative expression. Some people are able to map their lives along side these games as they reward a player’s investment over several years. Providing tools that can meet that level of creative freedom is usually impossible without great amounts of preparation. Moreover the tools available for preparation do nothing currently to uniquely tailor their resources contribution to a session. That is to say, if you had a castle in mind for your game, the current supplementation is someone elses description of a castle, rather than the kind of castle you were thinking of in your story. Look for resources for your game now and you just hope the things you find fit your story, or you fit your story to the things you find. Player’s of table-top games needn’t have their imagination limited to another person’s description of what they imagined.

Not sure how my request for a constellation of dragon stars became this but I’m not totally against it.

The problem: Players want to prep for their games with supplemental materials. Those supplemental materials are most often not bespoke, finite, non contextual, image separate from description. Unless a player want to spend ages in photoshop (some do and good on them) handouts for games are difficult to create given the time it requires to make them.

The solution: Radiant will generate for any DM | GM | Player, supplemental material they’d like in the form of both an image and bespoke description according to what they request from Radiant Assistant. Would you like a castle? No more looking up some random description, describe exactly the castle you’d like and Radiant will do the rest.

We’re targeting ‘note taking’ as a task many players cite as the most frustrating for their sessions. Often a DM only has time to make a brief set of notes for a description of some person place or thing they’d like to integrate in the story. When it comes time to introduce that asset in the story, with no handout to accompany it, some member of the players party will usually take notes to remember it in the canon of the story. Solving what a pain it is to generate bespoke assets fixes this problem, as every handout lessens the necessity for note taking. When you’ve a visual and written history of the story beat, there’s no need for notes.

Another cool mistake. Reminding me a bit of ‘Animorphs’ novels from my teenage years.

We would like both DMs and players free to explore any creative notion in great depth and at a rate, until now, impossible. When I polled players on what kind of cards they might make if they could freely create one, the answers could be oddly specific. One player, for example, said that she’d like a button which could generate the contents of an NPC’s pockets. This kind of granular detail is exactly the detail table-top games is best for, and now that level of detail is possible in the elements we can create for our games.

The joy of adding some unique and flavorful addition to a game session is something I’m grateful to have been party to in my life (pun intended). Seeing a friend provide some personal asset, be that an image, a written note (sometimes handwritten by hardcores), a song, or whatever a player decides to bring to the proverbial table, immerses in such a satisfying way, as to require 1st-hand experience to ever really know how good it is. With work and dedication over the next several months we hope to add more of these kinds of experiences to every player of table-top games.

Thank you for taking the time to read our developers blog.

This post has no AI contributions. It is written (poorly) by a human.