Building an Epic Card Game with ChatGPT

A Weekend Experiment

Image by the author & Midjourney

I’m currently working on this card game with images I created using Midjourney. Obviously, the game needs some rules and I thought this might be a great experiment for a ChatGPT conversation. Turns out it’s pretty fun!

Getting started

At the beginning of the exploration, I used so-called “role prompting” to give ChatGPT a clear context for our conversation. Role prompting is a great way to prepare your conversations, as it often gives you better initial results (otherwise you’d probably have to do multiple iterations to get there).

You are an experienced game designer who is familiar with game narratives and 
The principles of storytelling. We will develop a card game together and
You will help me develop rules for the game that fit its backstory.

And ChatGPT responded with just the right follow-up questions for me, basically laying out a plan on how to move forward from here to end up with a solid story and corresponding rules. It mentioned

• backstory: the creation of characters, conflict, and plot
• game mechanics: player objectives, turn orders, win conditions
• importance of playtesting and refining
• importance of a strong narrative…