Date: 2024
Type: Game
Summary: [A creative job-sim party game, with magic! Interact with any item in the store, in any way you want, to satisfy weird retail customers so that they give you good reviews.]
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Jam & Tea was a small indie game studio built around using large language models (LLMs) to create player experiences that weren’t possible with traditional game mechanics. My official role was Playtester, but I had the opportunity to work with the narrative as well.
Retail Mage, the first AI-native game on Steam, takes place in a magical furniture store. It’s whimsical and chaotic; life is cheap, but no one takes that too seriously. In order to immerse the player in the fantasy, every item needed flavor text. Imagine being the person who names items and writes marketing copy for everything in IKEA—then add wizards!
Retail Mage, the first AI-native game on Steam, takes place in a magical furniture store. It’s whimsical and chaotic; life is cheap, but no one takes that too seriously. In order to immerse the player in the fantasy, every item needed flavor text. Imagine being the person who names items and writes marketing copy for everything in IKEA—then add wizards!
We’d defined a tone I needed to maintain, but I also had a lot of creative freedom. We wanted the world to feel relatable and familiar, so I often incorporated memes and pop culture references and played with well-known fantasy tropes. I consistently received praise from the team—in fact, the only flavor text the CCO ever needed to correct wasn’t even mine, it was an LLM-generated excerpt from an in-universe magazine!
The witty, playful nature of Retail Mage made it really fun to write for, and I learned a lot about how to get creative while staying within the bounds of a theme. I also learned how to implement these changes in Unreal, which helped take some pressure off the principal designer.
As a bonus, the original idea for Retail Mage was mine as well! When we were brainstorming what kind of demo game would showcase us best, I pitched being trapped in a magical IKEA, and that ended up being the most popular among the rest of the team.