In the last LDs my main goal was to learn something new. AI is a divisive subject, as I noticed with my previous AI projects. However, as a professional software engineer, I use AI a lot to accelerate my work. It's the biggest technical breakthrough since the compiler, and cannot even afford to ignore it. And if it helps me create better games faster, I think I should definitely learn how to use it better, even if it means delegating work to something that's not entirely under my control. In the last LDs I did things like:

• create my own image GenAI (it sucked, it was my first GenAI, but eventually I turned it into a walking character generator.

• training AIs in the browser as part of the gameplay

• use LLMs to let the player create entire games according to a particular structural framework. I got significant hate from that, but I eventually developed this into a new AI toolkit, which I now use professionally.

I am dabbling with the idea of having the player create the game as they are playing it (other than text adventures, which has been done), and with accelerating game development by prompting game components other than images and sound (like generated maps and entities).

I might use AI generated images, but not in the regular way. An interesting challenge would be to create the entire dataset and train the AI within the LD time frame, or train it from user input.

Tools I may use:

• jgame.js (https://github.com/borisvanschooten/jgame.js)
• tinyspriteeditor (http://tmtg.nl/tinyspriteeditor/) (https://github.com/borisvanschooten/tinyspriteeditor)
• my animated character generator (http://tmtg.nl/ludumdare/ld53-charactergen/)
• CellSpace no-code IDE (http://tmtg.nl/cellspace.js/)
• gimp
• audacity
• jsfxr (https://sfxr.me/) or some such
• LMMS (if I get round to music, I think not)
• Pytorch or tensorflow.js - in case I include AI like last time

Happy jamming everyone!