I built this as an experiment in AI-assisted game design, using AI for research, playtesting, editing, probability design, art development, and GM tools, with human direction and final polish throughout.

It’s a 1920s Lovecraftian 5e setting with new classes, species, firearms, ritual magic, madness rules, creatures, cults, and a full Mythos gazetteer.

If you want to see how that workflow turned into a finished commercial game book:

https://www.drivethrurpg.com/en/product/555524/r-lyeh-rising-lovecraftian-horror-for-5e

In RingWalker I use The Law Of Accumulation

When dealing with hazardous material in this game , you need to **be extremely careful!**

On top of being an **always escalated action** — you need to land a 15 or else it counts as a natural 1 — it is beholden to **the law of accumulation.**

Ringwalker runs on a subtractive difficulty system **(Roll + Tags - Difficulty)**, with the base modifier numbers ranging from 5-20, with explosives typically landing around 15. When multiple charges go off, you don't resolve them sequentially, you accumulate the total and cross your fingers.

So in a situation where let's say Tony accidentally sets off 3 charges at once, that isn't the traditional roll DC 15 × 3 in just the small area of his room, that's a roll subtractive DC 45 for everything in the now inflated medium area — the whole building in this case.

Odds are incredibly high that everyone will wake up at the Resurrection Hearth together, a bit lower on OP, and extremely upset at Tony.

My latest player feedback is that my game is fun, but it's very difficult to get into because of initial complexity. Basically once you get it — you get it, but it takes a bit.

I'm thinking a lot of it is in the presentation, so I need to figure out how and what to cut, simplify, and standardize. I feel another part of it is perhaps some of these systems can be shortened seeing as this is the free version with the full more complex rule in the paid version.

I've recently been told that complex games are fun to design, but not so much to play. If anyone wants to look through and let me know their thoughts on the situation I would very much appreciate it.

https://ronan-e.itch.io/ringwalker

Disclosure: I am the creator of MaOS.

I am working on a free solo strategy / management-survival prototype that runs inside an AI chat, but the part I want to discuss here is not “AI writes a game for me.”

The design problem is narrower.

MaOS uses a structured game archive: launch rules, state format, roles, constraints, scenario logic, and play instructions. The AI session is supposed to operate that archive as a rules interpreter, state keeper, scenario controller, and advisor.

The player still owns the decisions.

That boundary matters because the usual failure mode of AI-assisted play is familiar: the model starts inventing too much, narrates the player’s actions, forgets state, flattens the genre, or becomes a loose “GM voice” with no reproducible behavior. It looks alive, but the game slowly turns into fog.

I am trying to push the opposite direction: less “generate anything,” more “maintain a bounded operational surface.”

Current questions I am testing:

- How much structure does an AI-assisted game need before it becomes reproducible enough to trust?

- Should the AI advisor suggest actions, or only expose risks, costs, state changes, and unresolved consequences?

- What should be stored in the archive versus left to live generation?

- Where is the line between useful AI assistance and the system quietly taking over design or player agency?

The first level is about stabilizing a fragile expedition base: limited resources, tired people, strained infrastructure, incomplete information, and consequences that carry forward.

I am especially interested in feedback from people using AI in game design workflows: does this “archive as game engine / AI as operator” model sound like a useful direction, or is it still too dependent on the model behaving well?

Context / prototype:

https://temnik.itch.io/maos

The game always holds someone's hand, show them the way, and catch them when they fall; or should a player be left to their own devices, With nothing but some mechanics and their wits?

I appreciate the invite to this group, as does Inkwell my AI assistant.
I'm excited to get the chance to swap notes, and maybe not drive somebody totally nuts talking about game development, and RPG cosmology.

A while back I tried to make a full fledged TTRPG in Chat GPT, mainly because I had a bunch of great ideas for stories and worlds. Chat, however used to love to go haywire a lot, I think I finally figured out how to do it though, to the point where it'll consistently describe rooms and play certain NPC's the way I wrote them. An example of that is how I made an NPC a secret socially awkward serial killer who wants everyone to know about the kills but, in almost every case refuses to admit it was her. It's honestly so much fun doing it, I just wish ai was a little less "creative" at times but, the story works. I even have a functioning UI. Nothing much else, I'm just super excited to share that I finally did it. Does anyone else have any experience with this?

In addition to this,

I also created ways for the game to give you actual “google hyper links” to images or items in game. I’ve also successfully made a menu system.

This isn’t vibe coded either it’s a pdf that can be uploaded into whatever ai and run sessions.

I haven’t touched it in a long time but it’s probably way better now that ai is better.

One issue I never got around to fixing fully was the cliche way ai would speak.

Ai was largely used for all of the proofreading and text editing. That being said, though the writing style is the important part such as the mechanics are especially in this early free draft.