Starlight Labs

Starlight Labs was a game studio using generative AI to create games and bring worlds to life.

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

hey all, i shutdown starlight labs (@starlightlabsco), the game studio I made to create new games at the frontier of what's possible with current AI models.

i open sourced all the work for it, although fair warning i didn't clean it up at all:

https://t.co/9ZsdoHxWSv

biggest takeaway is that in the game industry the *only* thing that matters is:

is what you make fun? is it fun on the micro, moment to moment gameplay? is it fun on the macro, overarching learning curve, that keeps you coming back for game session after game session?

i found that my game prototypes could never hit that sweet spot of being fun in the moment but also last more than a few minutes. they were cool demos to try rather than lasting games.

the reality is that most games do not succeed in doing that!! you can have teams of AAA experienced devs make a game and have it flop, and a single dev make a simple game that is the next megahit. finding that gameloop is the jackpot, and it's really freaking hard.

so if you're interested in doing something similar, focus on the fun.

in regards to what's next for me, I've already been working on something that makes me so unbelievably excited about that future (for quite a while now). it's much much bigger scale and scope, with a kickass team going after a really hard problem, and also, it lets me get my hands on hardware again, but more on that later :)

[Christian Dean @christiandean_]

Just tried this, actually a lot of fun. An interactive choose-your-own-story

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

just added collaborative multiplayer to bonfire (my AI storyteller)

now anyone can invite their friends and create stories together, synced, in real-time😤

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

Bonfire multiplayer coming soon 👀

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

the nice thing about websocket event streams is you can just as many subscribers as you want

makes adding multiplayer pretty easy (WIP)

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

✨ today is the first of many starlight saturdays ✨

I shipped the ability for users of my story generator to customize the narrator, story outline, and image style.

Still needs some tuning, but gimme your thoughts!

(next up: multiplayer)

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

man, storytelling is getting so much better with AI, and we're still so early

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

Bonfire users will soon be able to create story templates that define the narrator's personality, voice, story outline, image style, and more

you'll even be able to share them on a community hub and play with other people's creations >:D

still WIP

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

i am far too addicted to X to be able to do the big polished release post, but as they say "if you are not embarrassed by the first version of your product, you've launched too late."

come make cool stories and pretty pictures on the rewrite of my AI storyteller, Bonfire.

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

my journey of content creation continues : D

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

generative AI models like OpenAI's Dalle-3 are going to enable entirely new gaming experiences that weren't possible before

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

actually insane how good these are - dalle3 is the goat

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

sneak peak of a card game we're working on @starlightlabsco 👀

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

👀

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

shooting out a 2am update cause why not

past month or so I've been working on the complete overhaul of Bonfire, mainly because shortly after launching it, it grew to 1000 users but most had super janky, unreliable experiences

- rewrote entire architecture, much cleaner now
- switched it to monorepo (turborepo ftw)
- end-to-end typesafety, schemas, and validation
- bringing websockets to 100% - better auth method, heartbeats on both client/server, redis queue for messages happening during disconnect, and more
- sentry error logging, posthog session analytics, axiom logging drain
- switched over to zustand state management across the board
- integrated gpt-4 turbo, gpt-4 vision, and dalle-3
- integrated stripe payments / email / other "overhead" things
- general polish

will soon be deploying and shipping "v2" to folks and then am really excited for the possibilities of could come after that

- narrator using different voices for characters
- dialogue mode: talk to characters in the story directly
- campaigns: where you can have longer adventures were you create a character
- multiplayer (your friends or AI companions you create) play with you 🔥

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

Updated discord link for the Starlight Labs community!

https://t.co/b0BmEG3tDQ

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

@JaredC1728 @elevenlabs has been great for us :D

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

Hey all! Hosting a @starlightlabsco office hours tomorrow (Friday 10/27) @ 12pm pacific.

Feel free to ask me anything about agents, my latest project bonfire, or AI in general!

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

@AlexDeLune Thank you! Will look into this.

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

@AlexDeLune In regards to the email, which email did you try to reach? We'll need to look into it to see why it didn't come through.

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

@AlexDeLune You can read more here:

https://t.co/oTu6jq1jjn

https://t.co/vdvNK6nGFw

[Starlight Labs @starlightlabsco]

what are you waiting for?

what adventures will you go on? 👀

[Harris Rothaermel @DeveloperHarris]

i present to you: the ability to experience any story you want with a godly narrator and images to match

come try it out and burn my API credits!

(audio on)