Games We Play In Dreams

I built Games We Play In Dreams on the cusp of the AI explosion, encouraging people to use nonsense images as inspiration for creative games projects.

Games We Play In Dreams
☢️
I undertook this project in 2022. I'm proud of the creative and technical work I did here, but I'm horrified by many of the uses AI has been put to since then. Read my full thoughts on the subject here.

Project Summary

Organized and ran a community game jam. Built a custom website hosting inspirational images and game jam projects with unique social media features. Designed a custom font specifically for this project.

Games We Play In Dreams was a collaborative game jam I hosted, which invited people to develop their own role-playing game inspired by the dreamlike nonsense-images of early AI art. 40 people joined the jam and 10 games were submitted. You can check them out on itch.io.

The website

The core of the game jam was a website built hosting AI-generated images and the human-created projects they inspired. At the time, I was fascinated by AI's ability to generate images filled with the appearance of coherence without actually supplying it, dreamlike in the way they demand the viewer to fill in the gaps, interpreting meanings where none exist.

The website acts as a host for a collection of nonsense images, user submitted projects, and inspirational mood boards designed to be shared on social media.

A screenshot of the gamesweplayindreams.com home page.
The website includes browsable image categories and user-submitted projects.

Inspirational images

The project site acted as a host for AI-generated images. At the time, these images were often more dreamlike than accurate, hinting vaguely at a topic without actually depicting it.

AI generated nonsense images were split into categories for easy browsing.

Once a user selected an image they were presented with a specialized artifact page, where they could download it directly. Each page included a palette of colors a designer might utilize in their own project, generated from the image with a custom hand-written algorithm to produce results that matched how a designer might produce a color scheme.

An AI-generated book cover (with almost-english letters forming a nonsense title) is presented with a color palette.
An image breakdown including custom color palette and artifact ID.

Designed for social sharing

One of the main features of the website was assembling a "dream" collection of images into a single mood board for inspiration.

Six images, each generated by early AIs. The images often contain illegible hieroglyphics and almost interpretable objects.
The website generates mood boards for inspiration and sharing on social media.

Once generated, these mood boards included a direct social media sharing link, which would produce a specialized preview image adapted for the social media platform.

A tweet reading "I dreamt about this game..." and six inspirational images.
An example custom tweet, with a mood board image designed to meet Twitter's meta card requirements.

Dreamlike font

One of the more fun elements of the project, which played up the "dreamlike" aspect of the generated images, was to provide each one with an artifact ID and present this to the user in a custom font.

For this project, I took inspiration from the strange characters present in the generated images' almost-legible text to hand-craft a font. This font is also made available separately for projects on itch.io.

The "Dreamlike" font, designed to be almost, but not quite, completely illegible.