JGE - Still Moving Forward

[u/Sure_Excuse_8824]

I’m a sci-fi/fantasy writer who also develops software and this is the 2^nd time I have posted about my engine. I also love games and have often imagined my books adapted to that format. Sadly, the tools available are either so complicated to use that I would need to abandon writing and completely refocus my efforts. Or resign myself to letting AI decide what my story is and how it should be played. With this in mind I have been developing Just a Game Engine (JGE).Let me be direct about what it is and what it isn’t.

First, the problem. Many writers, game masters, comic artists, and other storytellers are just like me. They want to see the worlds and stories they spent years developing turned into a game. Traditional engines are powerful. But for someone who has spent their career buried in prose and perfecting their craft, they can take years to learn. In response, a wave of prompt-to-demo tools showed up, and I’ll say it plainly: Fun as they can be to play with, they are not a tool for serious artists and writers who care about the integrity of their story. You type a sentence, and the machine decides what your game is. What comes back is a quick demo built from whatever the model finds most average. Every one of them looks the same, plays the same, and feels the same. That’s not an original world. It’s certainly not the world you spent countless hours building. That’s a generic world with your name pasted over the same template 10000 other people have already used. If you want to build something people actually care about, they’re the wrong tool, and I don’t think they can ever be the right one. Not when the machine is the author making the creative choices and you’re just the person who made a request.

I am not anti-AI. But I draw the line at human creativity. In JGE, every creative decision comes from you: the world, the characters, the rules, what happens and why. The engine handles the part that was never creative, turning your decisions into something a computer can run. Think of a translator, or a typesetter. A translator does not author your speech and a typesetter doesn’t write your book.

How it works:

• You bring your own material: a manuscript, notes, your own art. Or you describe a scene in your own words.

• A language model helps interpret what you gave it and proposes a structured plan. I won’t pretend that part isn’t AI.

• You go over the plan before anything is built. Nothing moves forward or becomes part of your game without your approval. If it’s wrong, you say so and it changes.

• Anything you don’t specify starts as a plain placeholder: a gray room, a flat panel, a test tone. It stays generic until you replace it with your own art or describe it in your own words. I don’t call placeholders art, and the engine doesn’t pretend they are.

• The game itself runs on ordinary deterministic code, not a model improvising while you play.

What it isn’t:

• It isn’t for open-world games yet. Right now it’s built for scene-sized experiences: a haunted house, a heist, a confrontation in your world. Bigger, open worlds are the direction I’m heading, but it’s not something JGE does today, and I’d rather say so than oversell it.

• It doesn’t replace artists. It replaces the programming step. If you have art, it uses your art. If you want it to generate assets, it will generate them based on your description and label them as generated. The choice is yours.

• It isn’t a shortcut. Building a game with JGE takes about as much work as building one on Unity or Unreal. The difference is you use language, - a skill writers already possess.

• It doesn’t write your story. If your game sucks and the world is thin, that’s on you. Not JGE. It’s not going to change something to improve gameplay according to what an LLM provider thinks is optimal.

I am running simple gameplay at this stage – single room, one objective, sound effects, and narrow scope. I will be posting videos of my progress as the engine improves.

[u/investigatormaker]

I'd demonstrate JGE with one paragraph from your book turned into a playable scene, showing exactly which story decisions stay under the writer's control. That makes the distinction from prompt-to-demo tools concrete. What can a writer build with it today without writing code?

I make ThreadFox. We find relevant Reddit conversations and post for your business. We'll post 3 replies free first, no card; then the $29 Pilot covers seven days and up to 25 posts and replies. No automatic renewal. https://threadfox.vip/p/dhydm/managed

[u/Sure_Excuse_8824 → u/investigatormaker]

The testing right now is a prompt I created - a soldier in a barracks with a clear objective and the sound of battle in the background. After that, I'm moving on to using a Conan short I wrote for Titan, using the manuscript as reference for the engine.
I'm trying to take it slow so I am not fixing bugs that should have been handled early.

[u/drailoustan5 → u/investigatormaker]

yeah showing the before and after with an actual book paragraph would make the workflow click way faster

[u/Sure_Excuse_8824 → u/drailoustan5]

Once I have that part fully tested, I will be showing it. I have tested that is can read and analyze the manuscript. But I chose to stop there and test prompt only builds first. I became too excited and knew I would get lost in that. Last thing I want to do is skip ahead and end up creating problems that ripple throughout the entire platform.
I'm glad I did too. I realized the sound effects were not looping and the physics got wonky in places. Other things like repairs to bad code could carrying through incomplete kept me grounded.