God's Innovation Project - Empowering the Player with Generative AI
Ritvik Nair, Timothy Merino, Julian Togelius · 2025
How can we use generative AI, in particular textguided generation of key game content, be used as a core game mechanic? This paper describes the design, implementation, and and initial playtesting of a game designed around prompt-driven map generation. Our game God's Innovation Project - a god game in the tradition of Populous - allows the player to reshape parts of the game world with a promptable generative model. We further gamify the prompting process, creating a novel resource system where words must harvested via gameplay. We explore how recent advances in the field of Procedural Content Generation via Machine learning enable new types of AI-based game design, and assess the impact of AI on the gameplay experience using a small-scale playtest.