The Curse of Dimensionality

The Curse of Dimensionality is an experimental rogue-lite action adventure game which combines:

• hand-crafted gameplay, code and art
• AI-assisted procedural level generation

and lets you fight your way through a dimension created from your own prompt.

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Features

Every world of the Multiverse, real or imaginary, is merely a point in the vast multidimensional space. As the Interloper, you freely trespass the boundaries between worlds and timelines in pursuit of artefacts and power, inserting yourself into unexpected situations and defeating villains of the story along the way. What dimension will you visit next?

The game combines hand-crafted gameplay, graphics, and modular worldbuilding with AI-generated data for infinite replayability.

• Melee and ranged combat: Fight against hordes of enemies, or pick them off one by one, by switching between melee attacks and spells.
• Action RPG elements: Swap weapons and spells, collect experience points to become stronger, and use elemental attacks which offer advantages or disadvantages against specific elemental enemies.
• Modular world design: The layout of the levels, plot, enemy variety, bosses, items and spells all depend on the theme of the current dimension, but are balanced for difficulty and navigation.
• Procedural generation with a purpose: Lots of replayability as long as you have the imagination to come up with new ideas.
• Utter ridiculousness: Come up with outlandish or oddly specific settings and see how the game represents them!

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How this game uses generative AI

The game uses OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 API during world generation to generate all necessary data for a given scenario with a large language model, which can then be interpreted by the modular level generator. This means generating a new world requires an Internet connection, but playing the game afterwards doesn’t.

The art, gameplay, code, and a large part of the level generation algorithm of the game have all been created manually by the author and the sounds have been obtained and mixed from CC0 sources.

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What kind of dimensions can you visit?

You can turn any idea into a gameplay scenario as long as it’s not too vague or offensive, here are some example of the kind of dimensions you can generate:

• locations: London, France, Africa, the North Pole, Sahara desert, etc.
• events: French Revolution, World War II, 2024 Paris Olympics, etc.
• settings: Call of Cthulhu, Bram Stoker's Dracula, Alice in Wonderland, etc.
• descriptions: inside the human body, aboard an airship, four seasons, etc.

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How to play (important!)

The game currently only works on 64-bit Windows 10/11 and requires two separate steps to play:

1. Launch create_dimension and come up with a setting you'd like to visit, then wait until the world is generated (it should take around 2 minutes to generate all 4 levels and 4 tilemaps).

2. Launch enter_dimension to boot up the game and face four levels of increasing difficulty, fighting against a variety of diverse enemies, collecting unique weapons and spells, and defeating bosses to activate portals leading to the next stage.

If level generation fails, it should display an error telling you what’s wrong. Level generation works best with English language prompts. Once you generate a world, the files for it will be saved locally and you can revisit it by asking for the same dimension a second time (the world will be generated faster because the files for it already exist).

If the level generation console works but you consistently get an error, it could be due to connection limits being exceeded or OpenAI connection being down. You can use your own OpenAI key by including it in the settings file (a non-commercial OpenAI account should be enough to play).

Note: The level generator doesn’t collect any data and only creates level files inside the game’s directory. If Windows Defender or another anti-virus warns you that the program is dangerous, it’s a false alarm which sometimes happens with Python/Godot programs.