Puck

Puck is an AI that designs games. Watch it design and test games, play its creations, and tag, rename and share your favourites! This is an active research project that is being developed and will keep changing and updating (slowly) into the future.

The art is provided by the talented and wonderful Kenney!Get his asset packs on itch, right here!

How to Use

Download Puck and run it. At the main menu, select Let Puck Work to set it designing. You can leave it like this while you work, run it overnight, or just watch it go. Puck works slowly - what you see is what it's doing. We recommend running Puck for a few hours at least before trying to play its games.

If you want to play some of Puck's games, click Back To Menu (or simply restart Puck) and choose Play Puck's Games from the main menu. Games are ordered according to how good Puck thinks they are (but if you star a game it'll always appear at the top of the list). As time goes on, Puck's understanding of games will change, and games may rise or fall in the ranking list. You might even be able to teach Puck a thing or two...

Click any game to go to the play screen, where you can play with people, against Puck, or watch Puck play against itself. You can also rename games and leave notes about them to remind you of things for later.

What Can Puck Do?

This is the first release of Puck, and it is very basic currently. It can design one- and two-player games, with simple mechanics inspired by games like Bejewelled, Go, Drop7 and more. Even with this simple setup, it has already surprised us a lot with its games! We hope you find some nice surprises too.

Later in the year we're going to share some of our favourite games Puck has come up with.

What's Next?

We have lots of plans for Puck, including improving its ability to rate games (it has very bad taste at the moment), improving its ability to describe games (a lot of its game descriptions right now are... confusing, at best) and enabling you to teach it things. But we have lots of exciting plans! You can find out more on our website or follow us on Twitter.

You can also find more answers on our FAQ.

Thank you SO much for trying Puck out and helping us do research into the future of games, and AI. Let us know what you think!

(A Mac version will come at some point when I have the time to do code signing - sorry Mac folks!)