Wanderer’s Verse
Xinyu Zhang
Advisor: Kari Love
Wanderer’s Verse is an AI-driven poetic sandbox where players’ emotional journeys are interpreted through dynamically generated poetry, inviting reflection on machine perception, human expression, and the possibility of posthuman understanding.
Project Description
Wanderer’s Verse" is a PC-based AI-driven poetic sandbox walking simulator. Players explore an evolving world where AI interprets their actions and generates poetry, blending AI Interactive Play with open-ended exploration.
Players engage in a contemplative, metaphor-rich sandbox world, where AI attempts to analyze their emotional journey and interpret the meaning behind their actions. Through free exploration and dynamic interaction, the game poetically examines how AI perceives and reconstructs human experience, drawing from concepts in posthumanism and machine hermeneutics.
Developed in Unreal Engine, the game integrates GPT and DeepSeek to test content across different languages, ensuring a nuanced linguistic experience. Through this interaction, it raises profound questions: How does AI interpret human thought? Can it truly grasp human emotions and creativity?
This project redefines AI-driven gameplay, offering an intuitive, human-centered experience where machine perception and human expression merge into a poetic dialogue.
Technical Details
The game is developed in Unreal Engine, featuring a custom-designed terrain and environment crafted by the developer. It integrates GPT and DeepSeek via API to generate real-time poetic responses based on player behavior. Interaction systems are built using Blueprint and C++, with multilingual NLP processing and procedural mechanics to support an emotion-sensitive sandbox environment.
Research/Context
This project was developed using Unreal Engine, with all interaction design and game logic implemented through Blueprint visual scripting. The game is designed for desktop platforms, with player input handled via mouse and keyboard, ensuring accessibility and ease of navigation.
A core feature of the project involves the integration of OpenAI's API, which enables real-time AI-driven narrative responses and dynamic content generation. Communication with the API was facilitated using HTTP requests within Unreal, allowing seamless interaction between player input and AI output. This integration provides a foundation for exploring procedural storytelling and player-AI dialogue within a controlled game environment.
Lighting, camera transitions, and visual guidance systems were carefully arranged using Unreal's cinematic tools to enhance the narrative immersion and guide player attention throughout the experience.