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About the Game

Spin a tale, Shape a world — Co-creative Storytelling Game, powered by AI

1001 Nights is a witchy story-crafting game driven by a language model (like ChatGPT) and inspired by Persian Folklore. You play as Shahrazad, who can turn tales into reality. Your goal is to tell stories to an evil King, guiding him to mention weapons that materialize into tools for your fight...

Intro

"The limits of my language mean the limits of my world"

This is a story-crafting game where you need to survive an AI overlord by telling stories.

Inspired by the Persian folktale collection, this game follows the story of an evil king who, betrayed by his wife, marries a new maiden each day only to execute her the following morning. You, as Shahrzad, become his next bride. You possess the secret magic to turn language into reality... Can you end his reign of terror?

As the heroine Shahrzad, you have the magic that turns other one's language into reality! Guide the King (powered by AI) to mention weapons in his continuation, such as 'sword', 'knife', or 'shield' ... they materialize as weapons for you to fight the king!

The new reality from the tales will gradually emerge through cutting-edge AI large language models. Every story is unique between you and the King...

Trailer

https://youtu.be/LQ2X3yiqsR8?si=tATJeFlokXtqvfD8

Key features

Designed for content creation

Our game is built for streaming and community interaction. You can create unique stories featuring your viewers' names, memes, or personal touches, and watch as the AI King responds in surprising ways.
Similar to games like AI2U and Suck Up, but focused on creative storytelling --- At the end of each playthrough, you'll receive a personalized storybook of your adventure.

From Language to Reality driven by AI

Fueled by AI language models, witness your narrated tales metamorphose into visual realities, merging with the game's pixel art aesthetics.

Battle with Weapons from Your Tale

Each weapon collected from the story is unique based on your stories!
Use the weapons you collected to face and fight the King, in the story world that merged from your tales...

Challenge Traditional Norms of Folklore

Embody Shahrzad and defy ancient brutal patriarchal conventions…

Academic Foundations in Gameplay

"1001 Nights" isn't just a game; it's also an art and academic research project since 2020 based on GPT-2 (grandmother of ChatGPT). We've published two papers in the fields of AI and interactive storytelling during its development, which disclosed the behind system of the game.

History

The earliest version of the game was a demo created by the main developer Yuqian in 2020 as a master's course project, utilizing a fine-tuned GPT-2, well before the release of ChatGPT in 2022.

Afterwards, the game was invited to participate in several art exhibitions. In 2021, as Yuqian began her PhD studies and AI technology advanced, the game transitioned to being powered by Dreamily.ai, a story-writing model, and the first paper on the game was published in 2022.

Due to the limitations of AI at that time, the game remained a small-scale experiment, unable to handle industry challenges like player input evaluation. However, the release of ChatGPT at the end of 2022 and the advancement of generative AI, especially large language models (LLMs), provided solutions to these issues. Consequently, Yuqian decided to further develop the game as an indie game, founding the team Ada Eden in early 2023 to explore the potential of AI in storytelling.

The game then transitioned to using contemporary LLM models, such as GPT-4, and incorporated visual generation in based on storytelling. This workflow was published in the second paper in 2023.

At the beginning of 2024, following Steam's policy changes regarding AI, "1001 Nights" launched its Steam page and was nominated for the A MAZE. Award.

About the Developer team “Ada Eden”

Currently, Ada Eden is a self-funded indie team without any funding or income from 1001 Nights.

“Ada Eden” is a group named after the pioneering programmer Ada Lovelace. We were established in early 2023 to progressively develop games and conduct research in the field of creative storytelling based on AI. The main members include Yuqian Sun (producer, art director, programmer and lead designer), lead programmer Artemy, assistant programmers, writers, musician and artists, collaborating remotely across China, UK and North America.

Press & Talks

**Ada Eden’s AI-powered 1001 Nights is a human story about narrative power - Premortem games**

A MAZE. / Berlin 2024 - 1001 Nights: How to make large language models into an ancient King

Videos

Available on google drive

https://youtu.be/LQ2X3yiqsR8

https://youtu.be/0Q-55K7M2xI

A highlight video from Hanakyo

Screenshots

All available on google drive

GIFs

All available on google drive

Logos

All available on google drive

Game logo

Team Logo

Game Icon

Awards & Recognition

Next Level Festival, Dortmund, UK, 2024

AMAze Festival, Berlin, Germany - Nominee of Explorer Award, 2024

Now Play This, London, UK - Official selection 2024

Gamescom, Cologne, Germany, 2023

WePlay - IndiePlay, Shanghai, China - Presented as Nominee - 2023

Book of Sand: Aiiiii Art Center, Shanghai, China - Invited - 2021

Awards

2022 Lumen Prize - Longlist in 3D/Interactives

2023 IndiePlay - Nominated for Best Innovation & Best Student Game

2024 A Maze Awards - Nominated for Explorer Award

Presentation

GDC - **Game AI Summit: LLM as Core Gameplay: Co-Creative Storytelling in '1001 Nights' (Coming Up), 2025**

Game AI Summer School, Malta, 2024

Sony Entertainment UK Demo Presentation - Official selection 2023

Academic contributions

Presented in academic conferences:

DiGRA, Guadalajara, Jalisco, México, 2024 (Upcoming)

Foundation of Digital Games (FDG), Athens, Greece, 2023

27th International Symposium on Electronic Art (ISEA) Poster Session, Barcelona, Spain, 2022

Academic Papers

V1 Paper (2022, Early version)

Y. Sun, X. Ni, et al., “Bringing Stories to Life in 1001 Nights: A Co-creative Text Adventure Game Using a Story Generation Model”, International Conference on Interactive Digital Storytelling (ICIDS 2022) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22298-6_42 Also available at ResearchGate

V2 Paper (2023, new version)

Y. Sun, Z. Li, et al.， “Language as Reality: A Co-Creative Storytelling Game Experience in 1001 Nights using Generative AI”， AAAI Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Interactive Digital Entertainment (AIIDE-23) https://ojs.aaai.org/index.php/AIIDE/article/view/27539

Please note: these two papers are over one and two years old, respectively. Therefore, there is definitely some discussion, especially regarding the ethical use of AI, that needs to be updated and improved.

AI Content Disclosure

As an AI-native game that started development as early as 2020, before the release of various AI language/image models, our goal is to explore creative narrative gameplay based on conversational AI to bring players novel experiences they've never had before: telling stories, and turning stories into reality.

All game art assets are created by human artists. Specifically, this refers to assets that can be pre-prepared and reused, including but not limited to character CGs, scene models, UI, etc. The dynamically generated content based on player inputs: [story text] and [story scene images], are generated by AI. This is because the game is based on the player’s free input and requires real-time interaction (e.g., the King continuing the story), which cannot be pre-prepared in any way.

When we started this game as an art and academic project, our guiding principle was to use AI only to create novel gaming experiences that were previously impossible, not to replace human creativity in any way. In other words, without AI technology, the game mechanics could not be realized. Inspired by the ancient Persian folklore, the game's soul comes from us, the human creators, not the AI technology itself. AI is just the means by which this vision is brought to life and shared with you. As human artists and researchers, we hope this game serves as an example of how technology can be an actor, while human creators become the directors who shape it in artistic and innovative ways.

The main game mechanics are as follows:

You narrate stories to the King, who is powered by a large language model (the LLM in our free trial is GLM, he continues your tale. You must guide him to mention specific weapon keywords. Each weapon is unique, with descriptions generated based on the stories you and the King create together.
As you collect more weapons, images of the world in the story will appear on the weapon cards and in the game scenes. This is part of the gameplay we designed, namely 'turning stories into reality.' This can only be generated in real-time based on player inputs (e.g., the player tells a story about a forest cat, and then sees a cat on the card), and cannot be pre-prepared in any way. Technically, we use open-source CheeseDaddy and revAnimated as the base, combined with a licensed Pixelization algorithm.

We use a stylistic LoRa model trained entirely on art created by our team. All training images come from the game’s CGs and artworks that our team members have authorized for use. This ensures that the generated images align only with our original "1001 Nights" art style, avoiding any resemblance to external artworks and ensuring data sources and generated content are secure and consistent.

The basics of above workflow has been published in our 2 academic papers.

Currently, we're a small and self-funded indie team without any funding or income from the game. The game demo is 100% free and does not use player data for AI training. We are well aware that AI technology still has ethical controversies and challenges, and we understand players' concerns. It is our responsibility to listen to everyone's suggestions and feedback. With appropriate future funding and support, we aim to address and reduce potential problems from generative AI technologies. We welcome any concerns, suggestions, or questions about our AI-generated content and processes via adaeden1001[at]gmail[dot]com or through our Discord. Your feedback will help us improve and become more considerate.