[Lex Talionis] FE Infinity: AI Creates the Game as You Play | Playable Now!

[neon]

Introducing the latest incarnation of FE Infinity - the AI that creates ROM hacks. Playable now on PC and Mac!

FE Infinity creates your game one chapter at a time, adapting to your choices and character deaths. This makes each run unique and Iron Man-friendly!

Check out this introductory video explaining what the project is:

Video: What Is FE Infinity?

Download and play:

FE Infinity Website

Join the Discord for feature requests and more.

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How it works

FE Infinity attaches an AI system to the Lex Talionis engine: a Fire Emblem game engine written in Python. The AI crafts the story, characters, and battles and writes game code to be run inside the engine.

Cost

Unfortunately running state-of-the-art AI models is not free. To play the game, you must set up an OpenAI account and they will charge you based on usage.

Each chapter costs a fraction of a penny to create - it’s incredibly cheap. Additionally OpenAI often gives new users free credits.

I do not make any money off this!!!
You will pay OpenAI directly. I have no access to your OpenAI API key, nor do i take any cut. This is a passion project of mine, not a business.

Want to run the AI locally?
While this is not available yet, leave a comment if you want me to add support for AI models to run locally on your computer. This would be slower and the content would be lower quality but would only cost your own electricity. Please include if you are on PC or Mac in your comment.

Assets used

Character portraits, other in-game images, and battle maps are sourced from the free-to-use FE Repo. The AI chooses the best asset for the scene.

Creator Attributions

Open-source

The code for this project is freely available to read, use, copy, modify, etc.

Code

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Play for free for a limited time

For the hell of it, I’m donating $5 to the community which is enough for hundreds of chapters to be generated! Once the $5 runs out across all people using it, you’ll need to get your own API key. I’m not posting the key here - It’s only available in the FE Infinity Discord because bots scan the web for keys.

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I hope you enjoy this experiment in ROM hacking,
- neon

[WiiSportsRemote]

I dont know why, but i really do not like the idea of this.

[darkshockbro]

Hey, nice to see you’ve made so much progress on this! You’ve clearly been working hard on it, and this does genuinely look really interesting, so I hope there’ll be some interest from others besides me soon enough.

[SamsungGalaxyS24]

woah this looks hella cool man! I really love the idea of an adaptive story that changes because of in game events. I have to say while the map design and dialouge isn’t their yet (more of an AI problem then you) it shows a lot of promise. Good luck and all the best!

[wiraaly]

This cool. My income is meager so I can’t try it but from just the video it really amazing. Imagine combining all the settings to make grand campaign

[EggLemonSoup]

Pick up a pencil

[Pkherogamingyt]

This would be fun if the environmental costs didn’t exist : (

[XPGamesNL]

Whilst this is an awesome achievement coding and programmin wise, this is something that I think is pretty uninspired.

Why would I like to play a Fire Emblem game that generates a generic chapter (with assets that are owned by the community and IS) when there are so many more projects where a lot of love, blood, sweat and tears have been put in?

Also, may I ask you where you got the assets from in the screenshot? A lot of those are explicitly not allowed to be used within AI related projects and for training. It’s a gray area, because it sounds like the assets were not used to train the AI, but it does mean that credits are missing and that is a shame.

This is cool, but not for me.

[WiiSportsRemote]

Yeah, the concept is cool but the enviromental stuff with AI makes me not want to touch it with a bajillion foot pole

[neon]

All portraits I used are labeled as free to use in the FE Repo, and I gave credits in the attributions page. My read on all the community guidelines for this is that this is okay - and I’m happy to remove any assets creators don’t want being used in FE Infinity.

[neon]

There are still some credits left on the API key I put in the announcements channel in the FE Infinity Discord. Use that to play for free!

[neon]

@darkshockbro @SamsungGalaxyS24
Thanks for the kind words!

[TheQueenOfNowhere]

Best use of one’s first post.

[XPGamesNL]

Thank you for clarifying this!

[Vesly]

@EggLemonSoup

Pick up a pencil

I would appreciate it if we didn’t shame people for coding. It’s one thing when someone is trying to make a quick buck by creating a pay to win app with sloppy ai generated art, but this isn’t that.

Nobody seems to have a problem with roguelikes that have procedurally generated maps and random elements, so why is it a problem to have these same elements but with ai involved?

Personally I don’t like most ai art, and I am generally annoyed by how ai has invaded its way into my search bars. I called my phone carrier yesterday and I hate that I couldn’t get through to a real person - just shitty ai. But full disclosure: I have used ai to help me review my code, so I don’t hate every aspect of ai.

Even though I hate ai in many contexts, it doesn’t mean I have to hate it in all contexts by default. But that’s just my opinion.

[ATHATH]

I also gave this the benefit of the doubt, and if this was made for the sake of being a novelty (similar to, say, a randomizer), I’d be totally fine with that.

However, it’s been framed as a tool for hackers to “jump off from”, and that does leave a bit of an icky taste in my mouth. We have AI-less templates and such that serve that same purpose and don’t, say, kill the environment.

also he’s a cryptobro

also he did this

EDIT: See my follow-up post below for corrections.

[TheQueenOfNowhere]

Translating that statement to “shaming people for coding” is wild and dishonest.
And the problem with AI most certainly doesn’t end with profit.

The problem here is, if their statements on their last project for AI build files was any indication, that this isn’t a tool for personal tinkering, but an actual tool meant for ROM hackers to make their own fangames.
Personally, I like to believe that a platform for sharing your own artistic pursuits, and providing help for those who want to get started themselves, can do better than devolve into an AI slop printing machine, which is obviously just the worse case scenario.
But making that any easier is the last thing that should happen, and since you yourself are already annoyed by AI creeping its ways into search engine, I would assume you probably have at least some sympathy on why it’s maybe best to prevent this site from slowly but surely being affected in this way too.
I can only hope the mods don’t pull the plug once that becomes a problem, but instead make sure it never even gets to that point, which includes not allowing posts like this on the site promoting those tools.

Also, kinda insane to compare this to roguelikes, when there’s so many design elements involved in roguelikes (at least the good ones) and a good core gameplay that has to be established and created.
Outside of story, Fire Emblem’s gameplay is its maps and units.
Leaving all that to AI generation, which can’t think, express itself, make a point, is definitely not at all comparable to roguelikes.
You leave EVERYTHING important to AI generation here, which makes the entire experience pointless, because what this tool creates is not art, it’s nothing, it’s straight up inhuman.
And while I worry for any person’s humanity who isn’t bothered by being entertained by this, I think creators here should have a responsibility to shut stuff like this down and not give it a platform.
The creator straight up has a website, not like it’s going anywhere, but it shouldn’t be here, it should be far away.

And all of this is ignoring the tremendous energy costs of AI, and to use this you straight up need to use OpenAI.
Do not support OpenAI, dear god.

So yeah, AI has become a dirty word, sure, but this is the textbook generative AI that has created all this justified hate and has been destroying the internet in recent time… and is also contributing to ruining our actual world, which is insane that this is not a hyperbolic statement.

[TheQueenOfNowhere]

I’m just glad that cryptobros have such a hard time disguising how much resentment they have towards things like art and passion.
Really don’t have any faith in a community if they allow a guy like this to stick around, so I’m hoping for the best outcome here.

[Vesly]

I believe they’re speaking from an optimistic hope that some people will try out their stuff. I’ve always thought it’d be cool if someone decided to make a romhack using pokemblem as a base, but I doubt it will happen, lol. Talking about a bunch of ai generated projects appearing on these forums is just fearmongering imo.

You don’t need to like or agree with everyone, but I think we shouldn’t automatically assume the worst.

[TheQueenOfNowhere]

I’m just not going to be charitable towards someone who creates generative AI tools, especially not with what ATHATH pointed out on top of it, so not sure what more evidence someone would need that an art focused forum is the last place they should be in, considering they have zero respect for people who create it.
Which the creation of a generative AI tool should prove by itself already anyway.
I’m also not forgetting that you straight up misrepresented a pretty simple and straightforward statement to be about shaming this poor coder.
So not sure what you have to gain from doing any of this as a creator yourself, but it makes it pretty clear that your problems with AI in everyday life and online just stem from a personal annoyance rather than an actual ideological reason, so you really need to do some serious introspection, because this goes against everything art is supposed to be.

So yeah, sure, is FE Universe going to be overrun by AI slop?
I don’t know, but with attitudes like yours it’s certainly a possibility, and I would love to know the point you even see in allowing this in the first place when absolutely nothing of value could be gained from hosting this tool, but potentially so much could be lost.