Cards Of Valhalla

This is a project for a game prototype that mixes the narrative genre with strategy. This project is part of a set of projects that aims to study the use of AI in creating high-quality prototypes to validate low-cost ideas.

About the Game

As a gust of cold, biting wind, I feel life crawling back into me. Suddenly, my body is wet and cold, I feel the waves crashing against my skin, freezing my muscles; each blow is like a cold sword piercing my body. My eyes struggle against the external pain to open, everything is dark, and gradually, I feel as if light from somewhere is coming towards me, like an arm reaching out to rescue me. I realize I am submerged, and panic floods me as I remember I need air to breathe. With all my strength, I move my body, seeking air for my lungs, which now hurt more than any sensation I have ever felt. I feel one of my arms break through the surface that separates water and air; it is out of the water. With effort, I breathe, but the waves, with all their fury, drag me back down to where there is no air or light, only cold and darkness. I try to fight as hard as I can against the pain, but the feeling of losing myself grows stronger and stronger. My vision becomes blurry, and everything hurts a lot—the cold, the water in my lungs. I feel my consciousness slipping away from me, merging with the sea around me, but like a punch to the stomach, it returns all at once when I find myself almost out of the water. I can feel the ground, the soft sand beneath my hands. Suddenly, my body weighs a ton, as if it were impossible to move, but I fight against the pain and the weight to pull myself away from the waves that seem to grasp my legs and pull me back.

In this game, which combines elements of interactive narrative and turn-based strategy with a card game, the player is invited to live an adventure as a Viking. The player's decisions and responses to events can change their relationship with those they encounter in this world, as well as alter the events. Additionally, they must recruit warriors for their army to defend and attack potential threats. Battles are in the form of a card game, and the player must be careful, as lost cards will be more than just lost cards at the end of the battles.

About the project

Imagine if independent developers could create narrative games with movie aesthetics, like FMV games. How many new and creative stories and adventures would arise in this game genre! I developed this project to explore this possibility. This is just the trailer; the game is being developed in Unity and will have a mix of narrative mechanics and path choices with scenes that show the events, in addition to card game mechanics, used to simulate and control battles, giving greater power to the player's hands. This teaser refers to an experimental project that studies the use of generative AIs and intelligent systems in general in game development. This is also part of an exercise delivered in the AI for Devs course.Tools used to create the Teaser:

• Haiper
• Suno
• ElevenLabs
• Capcut
• Leonardo.AI
• ChatGPT

Creation process

The initial idea for the project and the game came about while I was working on an assignment for another course, a specialization in Game Design. I wrote the document and started the development of this project as part of the course submission, and I decided to use generative AI tools as part of the study and experimentation.

The idea was to create a prototype and a study on ways to use new generative AI tools in the development of game prototypes more quickly and at a lower cost for validation. This would even enable independent developers, without financial backing, to develop their ideas with presentable quality for their audience or even for publishers. This is a study that I have been doing on my own.

When the requirement for this assignment came up in the DIO course, I had the idea to create a teaser for my game project. In this way, I defined the tools and selected the key scene ideas from the game's story to present in the teaser.

With all the notes taken, I started generating the scenes in the Haiper tool. I selected the best scenes that best fit with the others and with the game's context, and began assembling them in the CapCut tool. The background music was made with the Suno tool and was already ready beforehand, as it had already been made for the game. After that, I generated some sound effects and sourced others from public domain (CC0) download sites. Finally, I decided to generate some dialogue presented throughout the teaser by characters from the story, to help contextualize what was being presented. I used ElevenLabs to generate the voices. To finalize, I used Leonardo.AI to create the game logo image shown at the end of the teaser. I assembled and organized everything within CapCut, and you can view the result here.

Think

Always make conscious and careful use of AI tools, and learn about the main problems of generative AI in my article on LinkedIn "Challenges and Negative Aspects of Generative AI: A Analysis".

Linkedin - Challenges and Negative Aspects of Generative AI: A Analysis

Medium - Challenges and Negative Aspects of Generative AI: A Analysis

More about this project: https://github.com/carolhcs/Cards-Of-Valhalla-Narrative-Game-AI-Generative