Hey then that's a win for me in this jam honestly haha. Love to stoke that curiosity :) I agree with you on all points re: copyright. Though, I don't think "ability" is all there is to the art either. I am a musician for many years, and basically everyone I know is better at music than me (Suno included) but I still make tunes and enjoy them and share them around yk.
Thanks for playing, and for your curiosity! In honesty I didn't put very good in-game explanation/documentation of what's going on exactly. I wrote a few devlogs, but should've put more info in-game.
The music you hear is pre-generated by Suno from a soundtrack of ~40 tracks, lots of which I made during/for the game itself (with Suno's help ofc). It just starts at Track 01 for first planet you visit, then Track 02 for the next etc. Not stateful or smart. So you can't "switch harmony" etc. Nor even change tracks in a decent way except by progressing. The music player UI was on the cards but got dropped >.<
When you type in words like "MAXX BASS" etc, those are pinging neurons in real-time on a GPT-2 model I've hosted, that's hooked up to interpretability software that can read out live neuron activations. These are translated back into planetary IDs. So your words = a specific planet. There's a planet for "??" and "a" and "as" and "asdf" and "For what are we if not sailors upon the vast sea?". So you're kinda flying around "latent space" in real time in a way - everything's deterministic, so the universe is finite and navigable (3072 planets in total).
That navigation part I got lost in the weeds a bit on (setting up the interpretability stuff, GPT-2 instance, nginx, cloudflare, oof - not good stuff to crash course a weeks learning in) but I managed to make it enough about finding our dudes a new home that I felt it was just enough to submit. Mostly I just hope people get inspired by the mechanics / use of GenAI in different ways :)
Yeah as Twin gets at, you can host your own client/server and basically just have itch redirect to it. So it's still being updated past the day this page opened,. My game was the same. For games like this with a model hosted somewhere, you kinda have to do it that way since itch can't host the model and do that computation itself. Figure out this stuff early in the jam is also a good ideas as it can be tricky >.<
Really enjoyed this. I particularly like the UI design and game language/lore/vibe you have going, it's cool and right up my alley as a space nerd! In my own space-y submission I got way too caught up in the planetary exploration part to add in much of a creature game, but I reckon with our powers combined we'd have made a sick space game of some kind haha. Good job!
Very creative take, immaculate vibe, and great execution. As others said, love that the "pet" isn't something typical. Great job the music/SFX too - actually nice track to listen to and birdsong was a nice touch. Lots of things to compliment tbh! For a 7d game it oozes quality.
It does indeed have a lovely look, vibe, and game-feel to it already, which is impressive for so quick a turnaround. I really liked this one's foundations.
This is nuts for a 7-day game, well done! Everything's beautifully animated, named, got stats, lots of little mechanics to explore, and it already has lots of "juice". Very impressive work!
This is super cool. Uploaded a few images of nebulas and its turning all space-y. Uploaded a few more and it got weird! You've got me. I'm gonna be back tomorrow to see what happens now, the intrigue has set in. Good job!
