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 Curse of Dimensionality uses OpenAI’s GPT 3.5 API during world generation to produce text data with a large language model, which can then be interpreted by the modular level generator to select and name assets and to build the level. This means generating a new world requires an online connection, but playing the level afterwards doesn’t.

The art, the gameplay, the code, and a large chunk 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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Privacy

The game requires a connection with an external server during level generation only. The server keeps track of the most recent IP addresses and inputs (level ideas) submitted to it. This data is automatically deleted within 48 hours, is not being stored in long term, is only visible to the developer, and isn't being used for anything other than confirming that the server itself hasn't crashed.

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How to play

The game currently only works reliably on 64-bit Windows 10/11.

Generating a new world requires an online connection, but once a level is generated, the files for it will be saved locally and you can revisit it by going into "All Levels".

If level generation fails, it should display an error telling you what’s wrong. Level generation works best with English language prompts. If you consistently get an error, it could be due to connection limits being exceeded or the server being down.

Note: If Windows Defender or another anti-virus warns you that the program is dangerous, it’s a false alarm which sometimes happens with Godot programs.