Something a lot like Pokemon Yellow

[npinsker]

> Suppose we want a new version of Pokémon Yellow with a new Pokémon creature. We don’t need to change the game’s source code, we just need to edit the wiki and then press the “remake game” button. Modding a game becomes as simple as editing the wiki. Creating a game becomes as simple as writing its wiki.

Is this actually at all feasible? The total amount of storage space used by the Pokémon wiki is hundreds of times larger than the original game, likely requiring many times more effort to write than spent by the original programmers, and it still doesn't cover many, many aspects of that game (e.g. that Pokémon is tile-based; what buttons do in various contexts; sound and visual UI design) -- to say nothing of the clever ASM and memory tricks necessary to make the game work on the Game Boy.

I'm reminded of that comic where the punchline is "do you know the industry term for a specification precise enough to generate a program? Code. It's called code."

[NeoTar]

> it still doesn't cover many, many aspects of that game

But I kinda love that as an idea. The text of the wiki defines the core ideas of what the game is, but a lot is left unspecified and to be interpreted.

Pokémon legends Arceus feels a lot like what someone who had only read about the franchise may create as a game, and it's a pretty awesome addition to the series.

[countWSS]

"Its called code"

Can you code a million games per day? The barrier to entry if this works out, would allow anyone to make such games by simply writing down a few pages of "mods" every hour. Or if you force ChatGPT to creatively generate some changes, it could be automated. Hundreds of games per hour? Local models trained on some custom dataset could generate these wikis in batches. Thousands of new games per hour! And if the generator runs on random seeds as input, why not try them all? Millions of games per day. Obviously a single person with this generator would be able to saturate entire genres in space of weeks.

[jayd16]

I think the idea isn't that it generates Pokemon Yellow exactly, just that it generates a game of similar complexity. If it's not in the wiki it's not relevant. If its relevant then it should be added to the wiki.

[Tepix]

The wiki can contain video clips or animated gifs showing gameplay.

[spondylosaurus]

The original Pokemon games (Red, Blue, Yellow, and Green in JPN) were also full of notorious programming idiosyncrasies and glitches. I'm not sure how safely you could insert new data into the game without poking the bear too much.

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_glitches_(Ge...

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_battle_glitc...

https://bulbapedia.bulbagarden.net/wiki/List_of_overworld_gl...

The 1/256 glitch is a fan favorite because to this day it still fucks over people who play Gen 1 competitive PvP battles.

[cljacoby]

Was the comic Dilbert? Curious to lookup the original

[esnard]

Wow, I also spent years reading those guides before playing by first ever Pokémon game. I even started to write my own guide. As a child, it was very fun.

Now I'm wondering how many people share the same experience.

[coffeebeqn]

My friend who I played Red and Blue with had one of those. They were an incredible resource. Later I was almost more amazed by gameFAQs which has very detailed guides for almost any game. And at least back then it was all ASCII with no ads. A million times better than the blogspam game guides that Google returns these days

[93po]

I spent weeks and months taking a dozen different guides online in .txt format and combining and editing them together and doing my own editorializing. I carried this around on a 3.5 inch floppy disk and anytime my parents dragged me somewhere boring that had a floppy drive, I'd sit on whichever computer I found editing my guides while they did boring adult stuff. Usually at a family member's or friend of the family's house.

[sakjur]

I had a guide for Wind Waker that I’d enjoy reading and mostly appreciating the artwork from (I’m not sure I even could read English when I first bought the guide), yet I didn’t have the game and only played occasionally at friend’s places.

I remember planning to collect all the statues in that game. I never did, and likely never will, but I’ve enjoyed Wind Waker more recently and it really is a great game and I would like to play through it at some point.

[ElCapitanMarkla]

The Pokemon Power magazine had a very small guide for Red/Blue at the start, I must have read that 1000 times over. Just before christmas that year I was yahooing some Pokemon / Gameboy things when I stumbled upon the no$gmb and the world of emulation... I have fond memories of that emulator and the debugger.

[NeoTar]

I was the same with a GameFaqs walkthough of Pokémon Red/Blue. It was written in a very interesting style too and like many people I wish I could play the Pokémon game that it helped to create in my head.

[aodonnell2536]

A bit younger, so the game isn’t the same, but I had the same experience with Pokémon Mystery Dungeon - I did ultimately get the game within a year or so

[idle_zealot]

> Changing a game becomes as simple as modifying a wiki

I feel like an implementation of Pokemon Yellow in a reasonably modern high-level programming language would be easier to reason about and modify than a sprawling wiki written in English.

[john-radio]

Yes, I got the sense from reading this that the author has neither spent a lot of time contributing to a wiki, nor writing software, because both tasks are scarily complex in a way that the blog entry skates over. But then I clicked "About" and I see they are in fact a staff engineer at reddit, so shows what I know.

[truculent]

There is! And it’s not too hard to modify.

https://github.com/pret/pokeyellow

[kevinmchugh]

Right. You could make adding a Pokemon as simple and predictable as modifying a yaml file.

[totetsu]

I sometimes used Gen 1 Pokémon as memory palaces. It’s surprising how well the layout of old games all sticks up there.

[ariasemi]

woah never considered that virtual spaces could be used to model memory palaces, that's very cool

[sebtron]

Interestingly, the maps never stuck with me, but I also use pokemon a lot for memory techniques - namely for letter pairs.

[herunan]

this guy remembers

[dexwiz]

Isn't this just data oriented design? The guide contains all the data for the game (maps, most graphics data as they were sprites, npc locations, stat blocks, etc). There have been RPG makers for decades that allow you to create a game with an OOTB world and combat engine. I guess a wiki is a novel interface, but it seems like a No Code game generator, which comes with a whole host of limits and issues.

This seems to come from a place where you think knowledge can conquer the world. Which it can, only when combined with action. Want to make a retro game that is reminiscent of your childhood? Awesome go do it. There are a thousand tools out there. But you are going to be shaving a lot of yaks if you think you can create something by solely knowing everything about it. Might as well build software with UML.

[theptip]

I've been pondering this recently; I think there are some really fun applications of LLMs to game dev that have not yet been explored.

Going back to the original AI Dungeon (text-based adventure game, fully-generated by LLM), it was a lot of fun, but hallucinations were crazy. You could just ad-lib a change to the world-state and it would run with it.

One possibility would be to have an LLM act as a DM and use Tool APIs to drive a world model; for example, the DM can call `moveMonster(newPosition)` a la the Voyager paper. The game engine enforces constraints, so you can't just conjure items out of thin air. The player isn't interfacing with the LLM directly, so they don't see the hallucination problem.

It feels like lots of experiments have already been done with pulling NPC dialog from LLMs, but what about crafting worlds (most easily in text-based games, but potentially graphical too) and then reifiying them into the engine? Perhaps this could make more cohesive procedural worlds, since you can have the stories in the world's history drive the actual layout of the areas, scenes, and characters.

[dantondwa]

Hah! I spent a lot of time as a child reading and studying that guide, while actually never playing the game until many years later.

[cronin101]

I did the same thing, used to fall asleep reading the strategy guide for at least a year before I got the game myself.

I was similarly absorbed with those annual “bumper collection of cheats for video games” books that used to come with tech magazines, endlessly rereading them and memorizing them for games I never owned.

I wonder:

A) How much this is endemic to the Hacker News demographic. I’ve always been absorbed in the pursuit of useless knowledge (later in life this manifests in unnecessary PC watercooling and Haskell addiction).

B) If we all had genius parents that realized you can spend £3.50 (much less than the cost of an A list game) and keep a child occupied for an entire year, while also encouraging them to read (!!).

[asmor]

This reminded be of 2kliksphilips's "The Best Game I Never Played", which is about the experience of being obsessed with a video game you can't access as a child so much, that you can never actually play it without being let down.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q7CZIZ-Zruc

[kej]

Pierre Menard, Developer of Pokemon Yellow.

[aftbit]

Thanks! I'd never heard of this.[1] Just shows that everything old is new again, and we really need to appreciate the Lorites[2] among us.

1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pierre_Menard,_Author_of_the_Q...

2: https://anathem.fandom.com/wiki/Saunt_Lora%27s_Proposition

[truculent]

Related: https://github.com/pret/pokeyellow

[__alias]

Same but with Pokemon gold.

The guide was basically a bible for me at that age, and used it heavily to guide me through parts of the game I would get stuck at.

I seem to remember places like the ice skating scenes and victory road being far more challenging than they probably were in reality.

[rickcarlino]

Interesting idea! I’m curious if one could create an app (purely as an experiment) where source control contains a repository of markdown docs and the build step just calls an LLM in a specific order.

[doublerabbit]

ROMs downloaded on a 16mb 133mhz HP pavilion PC was an alcove of hidden treasures.

Having access to games you could never really access with pocket money was something special.

Things are just not the same nowadays.

[empath-nirvana]

I think before trying to build a new game from scratch using a wiki, they should probably prove the concept by building Pokemon Yellow from the game guide.

[hiatus]

The waitlist for langengine does not allow + email addresses for some reason.

[lobsterthief]

Probably a bad email validation regex since this isn’t a good strategy to prevent the same person from signing up with multiple accounts.

[29athrowaway]

Kids nowadays know more about Pokemons than the animals they are based on.

[devnullbrain]

This is tangentially related to a pseudo-fact I like to repeat that makes a lot of people very upset:

Wikipedia is the world's largest open source software project.

[staflow]

Another fucking sales funnel article

[cald0s]

Respect the hustle