Are you scared of Pikachu? You might as well be in this AI-assisted horror game developed by a YouTuber Tyler Green. The content creator challenged himself to create a short horror game with everyone's favorite Pokémon in the space of a few days. By using AI, he came to some, well, interesting results.
Green completed the project in under a week, promising also to donate the money he'd get for the game to ASPCA, a non-profit charity to fight cruelty against animals. By using ChatGPT, the creator came to finish a quick little horror game, closer to a minigame rather than a full-fledged Layers of Fear, starring Pikachu.
In the title, the player explores a forest - in classic Slenderman style - while there's a disquieting Pokémon chasing you. Clearly, it is all about making it out alive, fighting back by using Poke Balls which you can throw to the monsters after you. After ten Pokémon are caught, you're free to escape via a rocket ship.
In order to complete the title in such a short time, Green mentions that ChatGPT was a necessary help, since it built certain things in quite a shorter time than he would have used. ChatGPT was also used to create a custom shader for the Pokéball and fix some other problems with Unity’s shaders.
Obviously, the horror title makes heavy use of several free polygonal models. The creator showed how he came to use a spooky Pikachu model by accident, since when he tried animating it, the eyeballs just dropped out of the model altogether. Green then gave the model red eyes, for that classic zombified look and used Unity's terrain generator for the forest.
Other models were also too expensive, like a spooky Gengar which cost $40 so he decided to instead use a free one with the classic red eyes he used for all other models.
While Greene doesn't state if he made any changes to ChatGPT's code, it seems that the AI can definitely help if you're in a pinch to complete simple tasks. But, using it to deliver a fully working title? Well, probably too early for that.