The path to delivering solutions for our customers always starts at the same place — the idea. Our clients come to us with a need, and we work with them to design a solution and build a project plan that brings to life on time, on spec, and on budget.
While we usually have weeks or months to do this, building something in a hackathon means compressing all the steps into a much shorter timeline. For our ChatGPT Hackathon in June, each team had 36 hours to develop an idea, design it, build it, and demonstrate it.
Each step has its unique challenges, but it’s the idea we all found the most difficult. The second team in our hackathon, CTO Joe Reda and software developer Annaliese Schropp looked to a shared hobby for inspiration for their project — a mobile application to help make playing Dungeons & Dragons easier.
The Idea
We’ve written about our team’s love for Dungeons & Dragons helped us improve our team performance. Annaliese is a dungeon master for her friend’s Dungeons and Dragons campaigns. The dungeon master (DM) is the person who runs the Dungeons and Dragons games by creating the stories and keeping track of the gameplay.
“You'll plan a lot in advance, and then your crew will want to do something unexpected, like enter a cave or go somewhere where there's a new character. It takes time to prepare a new character and create their backstory,” Reda said.
Reda and Schropp decided to build a ChatGPT-powered mobile application that allows DMs to create non-playable characters (NPCs) for use in their games quickly. NPCs can range from basic characters to ones with deep backstories. The team’s application lets DMs enter a set of variables for Dungeons & Dragons NPCs, and then the application generates the character’s name and details.
Building the app
It may seem simple, but anyone with Dungeons & Dragons experience knows that every little detail matters. The game has an extensive rules library called the System Reference Document, which governs how characters interact based on numerous variables.
“All the rules are there. There are all kinds of things, like alignment, character, class and creature races. We took all of the documentation for each section and included it in the ChatGPT prompt. So we could say, for alignment, the character is lawful evil and for race, we can say he's a half-orc, and then for occupation, we said he is a Subway Sandwich Artist,” Reda said. “We send those details in the prompt, and the app returns the character name, background details, and even a catchphrase. There's more than enough backstory here for a DM to use.”
Creating characters is only part of the application’s functionality. Players can purchase items — potions, weapons, and even baked goods — from shops throughout the game. The application uses ChatGPT to generate items for a shop using a prompt.
“One thing that people love to do is shop, but coming up with what items are in the store is time-consuming. The app does it for you using the context of what type of shop it is, the price range, and how many items you want to make available,” Schropp said.
In the demo, Schropp asked the application to generate items for a bakery — and the results were not your run-of-the-mill pies and pastries.
“What makes it fun is that the application generates items you wouldn’t expect. It gave me a chef’s hat and magical pastries,” Schropp added.
What we learned
The Dungeon Master ChatGPT application was Schropp’s first exposure to generative AI. She said the hackathon project was a fantastic opportunity to dive into the technology and apply it to something she loves doing outside of work.
“It was a fun experience, from figuring out how to ask it questions and get the feedback to adding context to the prompts,” she said.
Are you on a quest to add generative AI to your solution? Get in touch with us today to learn more.
Photo by Dan Horgan on Unsplash
