God's Innovation Project -- Empowering The Player With Generative AI
Ritvik Nair, Timothy Merino, Julian Togelius
TL;DR
God's Innovation Project (GIP) presents a god-game framework where players drive world-building through AI-generated terrain generated from text prompts restricted by a word bank. The system uses a lightweight $10\\times10$-grid generator within $4\\times4$ sub-grids to yield a $40\\times40$ tile map, enabling real-time, player-authored terraforming that directly impacts gameplay. A user study with 19 participants reports high terrain relevancy (≈84%) and notable creative engagement, while revealing challenges in prompt design, terrain balance, and control. The findings support AI-driven terrain as a viable, engaging mechanic for player-driven world-building, with future work on adaptive AI, prompt-guidance, and multimodal enhancements.
Abstract
In this paper, we present God's Innovation Project (GIP), a god game where players collect words to dynamically terraform the landscape using generative AI. A god game is a genre where players take on the role of a deity, indirectly influencing Non-Player Characters (NPCs) to perform various tasks. These games typically grant players supernatural abilities, such as terrain manipulation or weather control. Traditional god games rely on predefined environments and mechanics, typically created by a human designer. In contrast, GIP allows players to shape the game world procedurally through text-based input. Using a lightweight generative AI model, we create a gamified pipeline which transforms the player's text prompts into playable game terrain in real time. To evaluate the impact of this AI-driven mechanic, we conduct a user study analyzing how players interacted with and experienced the system. Our findings provide insights into player engagement, the effectiveness of AI-generated terrain, and the role of generative AI as an interactive game mechanic.