In an exclusive interview with Levi Fussell from Martian Lawyers Club, we explored the fascinating world of their upcoming game, GUG. This isn’t just another game; it’s an experience that promises to redefine the boundaries of interactive entertainment with an Infinite Gug Machine.
GUG is described as the world’s first infinite gug machine. Unlike traditional games, GUG evolves when played, can be broken, or simply watched. Gugs are (sometimes cute, sometimes gross, always intriguing) spheres of infinite range, where your creativity in an AI prompt gives birth to your one-of-a-kind gug. From there, you use your gug to wage war against other created gugs in turn-based rogue-like fashion. Fussell emphasizes that GUG will not sit still when left alone, constantly evolving and ensuring that no two moments in the game are ever the same. “The only constant in the universe of GUG is the presence of millions of gugs,” he says.
One of the standout features of GUG is its ability to incorporate past gugs and other players’ gugs into new runs. This system relies on a massive database that stores each created gug along with its creator’s information. The game uses the properties of theme and difficulty to integrate these gugs into new runs, creating a dynamic and ever-changing gameplay experience. For instance, players might encounter a ‘boss battle’ run in a Candyland-based world, where they face a series of easy gugs followed by a powerful creature.
The inspiration for GUG dates back to 2018, with the advent of machine learning in gaming. Initially conceived as an infinite card game using image generation models, the concept evolved over the years. With advancements in code generation around 2022, the idea naturally progressed into what GUG is today—a game that leverages machine learning to create an infinite variety of unique, playable gugs.
GUG’s creation process is a two-stage affair. First, the game generates a gug object based on the player’s keyword, inventing a unique name, custom effect, and various traits. This whimsical and creative step results in a static game asset. The second stage involves using large language models to generate functional code for the gug’s abilities, making it a playable entity. This innovative approach allows for the creation of unique gugs with their own behaviors, never programmed into the game before.
The AI-driven nature of GUG has led to some fascinating and unexpected team compositions. For example, a player typing in ‘communism’ might get a gug that distributes its health among all teammates, while ‘capitalism’ results in a gug that slowly takes attacks from another friendly gug. Other notable creations include a gug that attempts to post a tweet, one that changes abilities based on the day of the week, and another that demands recognition of its independence from other gugs.
The development of GUG was not without its challenges. Key issues included code generation, game balance, and maintaining player agency. The team tackled these by embracing data-driven game design and establishing theories of game design. They generated large numbers of gugs and evaluated their quality en-masse, similar to playtesting a procedurally generated game. For game balance, they adopted a mantra of “embrace the chaos,” making GUG a single-player roguelike that can be cruel and unfair, yet still enjoyable due to the player’s agency.
Interestingly, the team at Martian Lawyers Club does not aim to ensure perfect balance and fairness in GUG. “We have a few safeguards in place, but pursuing the ‘safety-net’ design with this kind of technology will always lead to hurt,” Fussell explains. “Language is versatile and mutable for a reason, and we can’t control it – just look at what people do to try to prompt hack the chat bots out there. We know the players will try to break our game and we are excited to see it. We are going to be reactive rather than protective.” Emphasis added by Author, since this novel idea will hopefully catch on in the industry as this progresses.
Fussell believes that GUG heralds the era of “evolutionary games,” which are more powerful than procedurally generated games due to their capacity for fundamental change. This makes GUG highly replayable, as players can encounter new gugs created by others from around the world, adding a fresh and immersive experience each time they play. “Imagine this: you finish a session of GUG in the evening, go to sleep, and then eight hours later wake up to play again. In that time, hundreds of players from the other side of the world have made thousands of new gugs based off of their cultural and personal preferences,” he says. “This is like waking up to a new Minecraft mod, piped into your game every day. That’s pretty immersive, no?”
When it comes to ethical considerations, Fussell acknowledges the complexities but emphasizes the innovative potential of AI in game development. “There are a million and one things that could be said here. I’ll caveat it by this: our principle from the start was to be interested in games that cannot be built without machine learning, or what is now called AI in the public discourse,” he notes. “We use large-language models and image generation models that are trained on data scraped from public sources, in most cases without the owner’s consent. But if we remove ourselves from the context for a second, it is hard to deny this is some beautifully strange technology we have in our hands.”
Feedback from play testers at events such as the Game Developers Conference (GDC) and GamesCom has been overwhelmingly positive according to Fussell. Despite the broader discourse on AI in gaming, those who have experienced GUG firsthand have responded with smiles and laughter. “For all the noise I hear about anti-AI discourse from the game community, we have shared this game with game developers, players, our contract workers, and we honestly tell them we are using large-language models and image generation, and yet every single one of them lights up with a smile and laughs when they generate their first gug,” Fussell shares. “How can anyone refute that?”
Looking ahead, Martian Lawyers Club has a grand vision for the future of gaming. While GUG is a significant step towards this vision, Fussell hints at even larger ideas that could further revolutionize the industry. “We have a grand vision. . .GUG is a step towards it, but we will very soon see many games that share GUG’s generation system, as more and more people figure out this technology,” he says. “Our sights are on something larger, and GUG as it is, was designed to answer one specific question we had about this vision.”
GUG represents a bold step forward in the gaming industry, blending machine learning with innovative game design to create a truly unique experience. As Fussell and his team at Martian Lawyers Club continue to refine and expand this groundbreaking game, players can look forward to an ever-evolving universe filled with endless possibilities. The free demo on Steam has brought in over 30,000 new Gugs, and the game is being updated constantly, so I recommend checking it out as soon as possible.
