I made a bookmarklet that loads the state from localstorage and also autosaves the state on each new craftĬonst exportState = () => JSON.stringify(`)

I would never have thought to drag things on top of each other if I hadn't come here to the comments. And the lines that get drawn between nearby points and labels goes even further to suggest that this is a game or experience about connecting things in a graph-like way - which, once again, overlapping does not fit into conceptually. Indeed, previous experience suggests that this would simply lead to overlapping and obscured labels, so we actively avoid it. It does nothing whatsoever to suggest that it would make any sense to drag the labels on top of each other. In this case, the interface invites you to drag things among the various pre-existing points, to continue the 'constellation'. (His most quoted example involves how a plate on a door invites you to push it, while a handle invites you to pull - and this way you'll never try to pull a door that needs to be pushed open, or vice-versa.) It's their job to design something so that it teaches you how to use it. And that the responsibility of understanding how to interact with an object, or program, always lies with the creator of that object or program. Which basically teaches you that the user is almost never dumb, but rather human. One of the best lessons I ever learned was from Don Norman's famous book, The Design of Everyday Things. You're not dumb - it's not only unclear, but the interface actively suggests the opposite of what you're supposed to do. I'm also seeing a lot of my favorite game creators on twitter enjoying the toy and I'll trust their taste over mine :) I think I'm just tired of thinking in language. Maybe I'm losing my imagination, but doing it like you suggest, creating challenges, is makes it more fun. This is directly opposed to the actual act of crafting which is 100% rooted in the material world and has no relationship to language. I think what gives me this impression is that things are commonly related to each other using words rather than their meaning - getting from 'pirate' to 'captain crunch' to 'serial killer' is obviously following lines of language rather than the core concepts that relate objects. So to me it feels like playing against a soulless vector database rather than something engaging and well-crafted. I finally got 'Tostzilla' which has a pizza emoji, and then 'lunch', and 'breakfast', and 'party'+'toast'='celebration' ? but it feels random and illogical at some point I just gave up. I eventually got to chestnut which got to bread, but it was a lot easier to get to 'Toast Toast Toast' or 'Chestnutzilla' or 'Treasure' + 'Toast' = 'Pirate'. My goal is to get some kind of food, but combining combinations of water, plants, fire, etc are way more likely to produce dragons and universes. I'm curious how llms will fit into an engaging game experience in the future. I'm not trying to be negative and this isn't a dig on creativity of the wonderful Neal but more points to the immaturity of llms applied to games, maybe to my overexposure to chatgpt, and maybe a prediction that human touch will always be required to make something entertaining. But it is not engaging at all and feels nonsensical to me, especially when compared to little alchemy. Just a guess.Īs an aside, the game is technically interesting, being a really simple example of using llm generation for game mechanics. And given the exponential/factoral (?) amount of combinations this may be reached surprisingly quickly. If there's a lot of attention on the site the llm service might be down or overloaded.

' so it's probably typically caching the combination of phoenix+seeds but if there is no cache entry it would use llama to make up something.

Cheat sheet for little alchemy 2