Building an indie colony sim where your colonists run on your scripts — Transcript

Full transcript

1. 0:00Hi, and welcome to Far Camp. This is a
2. 0:02colony simulator I've been developing
3. 0:04for a few weeks, and in this
4. 0:06introduction video
5. 0:08I'll be talking a bit about how I made
6. 0:10it.
7. 0:12By now, I'm sure everyone's seen a video
8. 0:14game developed by AI, and a lot of these
9. 0:16are really good-looking games, but most
10. 0:19of them are one-shot development.
11. 0:21Meaning a single prompt generates the
12. 0:23entire thing, and that's not what I'm
13. 0:25going to show you today. Today, I'm
14. 0:26going to show you how I built a colony
15. 0:28simulator using AI development platforms
16. 0:31like Claude Code, Codex, and my own,
17. 0:34which I've been calling OI, as well as a
18. 0:36bunch of tools and services that I've
19. 0:39been building as open systems, which are
20. 0:41going to be open source and free to use,
21. 0:43and eventually community-driven. What
22. 0:45you're seeing here is the current build
23. 0:47of the colony simulator, which I'm
24. 0:49calling Far Camp. I've been solo
25. 0:51developing this with a team of agents
26. 0:53doing everything from writing the code
27. 0:56to generating the assets to creating
28. 0:58procedural generation techniques for the
29. 1:01world, for audio, and at the end of the
30. 1:04series, I'll be sharing all of my
31. 1:05workflows with you for free in hopes
32. 1:07that some people find them useful, and
33. 1:09they jump on and help me community
34. 1:11develop them. The game started as a
35. 1:13proof of concept last year.
36. 1:14It was very basic. The art assets
37. 1:17weren't really there.
38. 1:18Uh the main proof of concept though is
39. 1:20that I wanted to have natural language
40. 1:23driving the routines of the colonists,
41. 1:25and that part worked really well. But, I
42. 1:28didn't have time to do a full game
43. 1:30development effort, where I designed the
44. 1:32art assets. I was doing a lot of other
45. 1:34work full-time, and this was just a
46. 1:37hobby. So, I tried to use the AI models
47. 1:39back then to help me generate assets,
48. 1:41but they were sub par, and I kind of
49. 1:44just put it on a shelf. Fast forward to
50. 1:46today, and we have some amazing models
51. 1:49like Astra, Fable, Opus, and their
52. 1:52understanding of geometry is decades
53. 1:55ahead of what it was last year. Very
54. 1:58quickly, this time around I was able to
55. 2:00generate some really nice-looking
56. 2:02stylized assets. And that's how this
57. 2:04project restarted. So, from that I then
58. 2:06focused on some procedural generation
59. 2:08routines. And so now every world that is
60. 2:11generated creates its own brand new
61. 2:13plants and creatures. But I thought,
62. 2:15"Hey, it would be nice to have something
63. 2:17familiar also." So, out of 32 species,
64. 2:21and that's just the number I picked for
65. 2:22now, half of them are reused from
66. 2:25previous playthroughs. So, you might
67. 2:26recognize something familiar and have an
68. 2:28advantage over your last playthrough.
69. 2:31So, you might see a blueberry bush and
70. 2:33you're pretty certain that's the same
71. 2:35one you played with last playthrough.
72. 2:38And so, you could take the chance and
73. 2:39just eat it without first observing it,
74. 2:42but there's also a chance your memory
75. 2:43doesn't serve you very well and it is
76. 2:45poisonous. So, pretty much everything in
77. 2:47a new world has to be studied and
78. 2:49observed before you can interact with
79. 2:51it, at least safely. And if you're
80. 2:53unlucky and the colonists you got rolled
81. 2:55have low intelligence, well, you got to
82. 2:57build that up for some of the things you
83. 2:58need to observe. But after that initial
84. 3:01proof of concept with the art, I wanted
85. 3:03to switch to making sure this game
86. 3:05concept was fun. And to make it stand
87. 3:08out from just a regular colony simulator
88. 3:10because there's a lot of those already.
89. 3:12So, the highest priority item was to
90. 3:14bring back my old scripting system,
91. 3:17which would allow me to fully customize
92. 3:19the routines of the colonists. So,
93. 3:21unlike RimWorld where you have set
94. 3:22behaviors and you just have to set those
95. 3:24up with mouse clicks. Here you can
96. 3:26actually type in script and have
97. 3:29colonists do nearly anything. Well,
98. 3:31anything that's allowed in the game. But
99. 3:33I didn't expect players to learn a new
100. 3:35scripting language just to play the
101. 3:36game. And so, what I wanted to prototype
102. 3:39really quickly was the ability for a
103. 3:42player to use their own AI agent,
104. 3:45whether it's Claude code or whether it's
105. 3:48ChatGPT in a browser, as As as it has
106. 3:50MCP access, which is just a connection
107. 3:53protocol to other systems, as long as it
108. 3:56has that, and most of them do, it can
109. 3:58connect to the game, and you can
110. 4:00basically tell your agent, "I want my
111. 4:02colonist to collect up to 20 wood
112. 4:06whenever the stockpile goes under 10."
113. 4:09And then it'll generate the script for
114. 4:11you in the game. And so, in a way, it
115. 4:14kind of teaches you scripting, and this
116. 4:16script is very similar to Python. So, in
117. 4:19a way, you're kind of learning Python as
118. 4:22you learn to play this game. Now, all of
119. 4:24this is optional. You don't have to
120. 4:26learn any of this custom routine
121. 4:29building in order to play the game. We
122. 4:31can play it just like RimWorld, where we
123. 4:33mouse click every routine we want. But,
124. 4:36if you really want to get customized,
125. 4:38this is the thing I wanted to prototype.
126. 4:40And it worked just as well as in my
127. 4:42initial prototype from a year ago, but
128. 4:44now we have it in Godot, and we have it
129. 4:46with much better graphics. And the
130. 4:48really strong feature from this is
131. 4:50replayability. That every time the game
132. 4:52ends, or you lose, or something happens,
133. 4:55you get to keep all of your scripts, and
134. 4:57you can modify them. And so, when you
135. 4:59start again, you don't have to start
136. 5:00from scratch. You can already start your
137. 5:03colonists with your previous routine, so
138. 5:05you have a leg up from the last
139. 5:06playthrough. I think it's a really
140. 5:07powerful system, and I haven't seen this
141. 5:10in many games, or in many colony sim
142. 5:12games. And so, once those core concepts
143. 5:15were proven working well, it was time to
144. 5:18just get started on a very simple
145. 5:20playthrough.
146. 5:21And for that, I just wanted some basic
147. 5:22things, a couple beds, a fireplace, some
148. 5:26basic routines, like feeding and
149. 5:28hydrating themselves. And so, we needed
150. 5:30water. We had the original plants, and
151. 5:32we had animals, but no hunting yet. And
152. 5:35so, on our first playthrough, we were
153. 5:36able to build a very humble camp with
154. 5:38just the basics. Eventually, this would
155. 5:40lead to cozy sound effects of the fire
156. 5:44crackling, the nighttime crickets, but
157. 5:46that's something for later, and we'll
158. 5:47get into that in some later episodes and
159. 5:50how I did that procedurally also. We
160. 5:51very quickly rolled out some basic
161. 5:54weather so that it gets cold at night,
162. 5:56and so they needed to stay warm, and
163. 5:58while the fire helped, they also could
164. 6:00eventually build towards a shelter. And
165. 6:03so that's the next part we added to
166. 6:05this, and we were now able to survive
167. 6:07through the elements for a couple days.
168. 6:09We had food, we had water, we had
169. 6:11shelter, heat, and we could basically go
170. 6:14on like this forever because food
171. 6:16replenished itself, and so did water.
172. 6:18And so that became a problem. What is
173. 6:21the first stress we add for the players?
174. 6:24What's the first challenge? What do they
175. 6:26need to build towards to survive? And so
176. 6:28I wanted something a little bit creepy
177. 6:30that possibly happens at night.
178. 6:32Something where you see eyes circling
179. 6:35your camp in the dark, and you might
180. 6:37hear howls, but that's for another
181. 6:40episode.
182. 6:41That's all I wanted to cover for now. I
183. 6:43hope you think this might be fun. In the
184. 6:45description, I've left a link for how
185. 6:48you can join in the development as well,
186. 6:50contributing ideas. Like I mentioned,
187. 6:52everything will be open source. That's
188. 6:54all for now, and thanks for watching.