If there is one subject that will make people talk in 2023, it is artificial intelligence. ChatGPT, Bard and other Dall-E fascinate as much as they worry. A newcomer seems a little more sympathetic since he is tackling a less human domain (and even more so!) than literature or painting: video games. Soberly baptized MarioGPT, this new robot is capable of generating levels of Super Mario Bros by following a few simple instructions. No more wasted hours on the different opuses of Super Mario Maker !
Be careful, MarioGPT is not yet as “intelligent” as ChatGPT. For the moment, there are very few parameters taken into account: the height of the level, the number of blocks and pipes, the presence and the number of enemies (only one type, the poor goombas), And that’s regarding it. But with these few instructions, the team of developers working for the University of Copenhagen, behind MarioGPT, managed to generate 250 totally different levels. Many improvements are planned, the project’s github recap.
Random levels, not really a novelty
The creation of random levels, we already know in the video game. Lovers of F-Zero X on Nintendo 64 (in 1998, already) remember for example the races X precisely, created in a completely random way by the CPU. Closer to home, type games rogue like often use a similar process: Dead Cells is an excellent example of this with its biomes that are always different in their layout. But what differentiates Mario GPT from a more classic random generator is that the user’s wishes are respected.
In the future, this technology should make life easier for video game studios. After having created the heart of the game, they will just have to tell their AI to develop levels with more monsters, fewer walls, to adapt the aggressiveness of the mobs according to their wishes to arrive at a playable result very quickly. . But will they open Pandora’s box? Hard to say as the level design remains a delicate alchemy. But following all, Dall-E and ChatGPT surprised us more than once… There’s no reason it should be any different for MarioGPT.
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