First Impressions of an AI Simulated Version of Travelling at Night
With the regular updates on Travelling at Night and teases of a demo, it’s become unbearable having to wait to get my hands on the game. Then it occurred to me that artificial intelligence (AI) has advanced to a point that it can probably give me a reasonable approximation of the experience. In fact, because it’s being trained on all the material Weather Factory has released and my existing preferences, there’s a good argument that Grok will make an even better version of the game.
Now, full disclosure, I was actually pretty disappointed at the start. It looked like the screenshots with some flaws (there are literally holes in the world right now) but then this game is in production so I figured this was probably what the devs are looking at right now anyway. In fact the game looks great. I clicked and this well-dressed detective, I’ll call him The Dapper Man, started running around the loony bin so I spent the first few minutes making crazy noises while running The Dapper Man up and down the halls.
I didn’t spend much time on the Cirque du Soleil bit with the hot bros and broette. No real complaints about this, but it just felt kind of like maybe the developers were Canadian and really wanted to show off how hot and talented they are or something.
I then went to a city that was obviously European with a bunch of cafes and bookstores and all that, except it was also partly bombed out. Very cinematic. In fact it reminded me of this movie from Greeneland I had to watch called The Third Man where this guy was looking for his friend who was a cuckoo clock salesman and they finally found each other in the London Eye. But this is also where some of the problems came in.
Literally everyone I ran into was all bombed out and sad and talking about how hard life is and how war is bad and I was like “okay I GET IT you’re a bunch of europoors who have dryers that leave your clothes damp.” This might be a Mr. Alden thing where you just need to find the trick to get past the gloomy people to get to the awesome bits. So far as I can tell the story is that the star commies and America are fighting to take over the sads, but I usually focus on these plot details before a fight and it went on so long without a fight that it all kind of started blurring together.
Eventually I just stopped talking to people and admired the sights. I ran into a tank and all of a sudden some dialogue popped up.
“I’ve got a martial plan for you!”
Then this, like, huge scab on legs (well, a leg) runs through the tank and literally splits it in half! All of a sudden some dialogue came booming out of my speakers.
“MY NAME IS THE COLONEL AND I AM HERE TO TURN IT UP TO ELEVEN!”
And he totally starts tearing up the place like it’s an isometric DOOM game or something. It’s the most incredible thing I’ve ever seen but then X, the everything app where it all happens, said I was out of tokens and I needed to pay more.
So that’s about it unless someone wants to buy me more tokens. Honestly 11/10 for the finale and I’m just sorry I wasted so much time and tokens on all the words. I’m super stoked to see the game when it’s ready.