AI Forge RPG

Pitch

Think Ready Player One, but the worlds are real: a machine intelligence has torn rifts between dimensions, so knights, street racers and starship pilots now share the same streets. Every player builds their own kit by describing it. Spend XP and materials at the Forge, type "a neon katana made from a broken streetlight", and a few minutes later it's in your hand, drawn in the game's anime style and doing things no stock item does.

No two players end up the same. The game stays fair because the AI chooses the look and the combination of effects, while the game's rules decide how strong it can be.

Concept art

First exploration round: NoobAI-XL on a rented RTX 4090, six takes for each of six briefs, on 1 November 2026. These are the best two from each brief. All 36 takes, with their prompts, are kept in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/noobai_v1. These are mood references, not final style: the game is cel-shaded 3D.

Round two: one hero at a time, and the Forge again

Same model, same day. Each hero was painted separately with their gender, age and outfit named, and revealing outfits and multi-character sheets added to the negative prompt. That fixed the lineup: four clearly different people, each fully clothed. All 26 takes are kept in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/noobai_v2.

Round three: the Forge painted over a 3D blockout

The way Super Potato Fighter's stages are made. A rough Blender model (tools/forge_blockout.py) puts the anvil, hammers, ring, furnace and pillars exactly where they should be. It renders a lit colour image and white outlines, and NoobAI paints over the colour image while a line model holds it to the outlines. At denoise 0.65–0.75 with strong lines, the result looked like a painted grey box. At 0.85 with lighter lines (strength 0.4 for the first half of the steps), it turned into a real forge. At 0.9 the anvil started to slip.

Cross-dimension heroes

Characters who used the Forge to build their own look from sci-fi, fantasy and modern tech at once. Eight briefs with four takes each, all kept in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/heroes_cross_v1.

Character example: the DJ wizard

A street-smart sci-fi wizard who DJs: what a player might forge as their look, with a power or gadget that plays music. Two briefs (a man and a woman) with six takes each, plus a venue, all in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/dj_wizard_v1. Every take kept the skin tone and stayed fully clothed.

In the game: this is a Look forge that mixes all three eras (an Epic forge, with two materials), and the record is a natural Power. A Power + Look merge would let the turntables live on the body, with the cooldown shown as the record spinning down.

Decisions

Pillars

The world

The Machine Lord, an AI that outgrew its own dimension, forced its way into the others because it wanted to control more of the multiverse. Its arrival tore rifts between them. Now the realms bleed into each other: a cyberpunk city whose sewers open into a dwarven mine, a medieval market selling scrap circuit boards, a suburban shopping mall with a rift in the food court.

The Machine Lord's hold

Every forge feeds the Machine Lord. Each realm has a shared Hold meter showing how much of the realm the Machine Lord controls. Forging fills it, and fighting back drains it. When it fills, the Machine Lord breaks through in a world event. Every forge is a personal gain paid for by the whole realm.

When the meter fills: an incursion

• The realm visibly changes: rifts tear open, the sky glitches, and Machine Lord forces arrive with a Tech Lord's avatar as the world boss.
• Win: the meter resets and the realm drops rare materials, which feed the next round of forging. The loop is: forge, the meter fills, defend the realm, earn materials, forge again.
• Lose, or ignore it: the realm becomes occupied. Forging there costs more, machine enemies patrol, and some shops and quests close until players free it.

In each mode

Realms matter to forging because each realm drops its own materials, and materials push the AI towards certain effects and looks. Exploring widely gives you a wider palette to forge from.

Three sides: the Machine Lord, the Unlit and the Lit

The rifts didn't only join the dimensions together. They also opened onto the dark between them, and something came through that the Machine Lord never planned for.

Who players fight: the antagonist roster

Each enemy side has ranks, from fodder up to named bosses, and a way of fighting that tells them apart at a glance. The Machine Lord's forces are orderly and gold. The Unlit are absences and ambushes. Both have human followers, so not every antagonist is a monster.

The Machine Lord's forces

How they fight: in formation, by the numbers. They flank, call for support, and hack Signal gear. They never retreat unless ordered, and they talk to each other in a chirping code the player can learn to read with a Scan item.

The Unlit

How they fight: they don't; they take. The Unlit have no bodies, so every Unlit enemy is something they've possessed. They ambush from darkness, put out lights, and flee from bright ones. The player's tools against them are light, fire and the Lit: a torch is a weapon here, and breaking a streetlight in an Unlit fight is a mistake.

Hollows can be saved. Beating a Hollow without killing it, then bringing light or a Lit to it, frees the host. Freed people remember what the Unlit saw, which is where many quests come from. Killing them is faster, and raises Dusk.

Human antagonists

Not every enemy wants to be one. These are the NPCs players talk to as well as fight:

Concept art: the roster

Round eight, 2 November 2026. All 48 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/foes_v1.

What didn't work: the Scrap swarm (four empty cities with gold dots), the Choir's circle and the Hollows' faces. Crowds and close-ups of the possessed need gpt-image.

Tech Lords: the Machine Lord's avatars

The Machine Lord doesn't fight in person. It sends Tech Lords: its lieutenants, each one a mind it split off to rule a realm, and each one fights through a colossal mecha avatar. These are the game's huge bosses, 60 to 100 metres tall, the giant robots of the mecha anime the game draws on, and every one is made by the Machine Lord rather than forged.

• Built to the Machine Lord's look, not the Forge's: black and gold, haloes of machine rings, cables hanging like robes, red sensor eyes. A player's frame is hammered and mismatched; a Tech Lord's avatar is perfect, and that's the point.
• They lead incursions. When a realm's Hold fills, its Tech Lord's avatar arrives as the world boss.
• Fought in layers. Mech armour and on-foot players climb it and break its joints, while Forgeframes trade blows with it. Neither branch can win alone.
• Its heart is the prize. A beaten avatar drops its core, the boss trophy for a Legendary Forgeframe or mech armour.

The four Tech Lords

Each Tech Lord rules one realm and has its own idea of what "abundance for control" means. They talk to players through screens, Converts and the Forge itself long before the fight, so by the time the avatar arrives the player knows who they're fighting.

What didn't work: the tiny fighters on the rooftops mostly vanished, so the scale reads only from the city.

The Elder Gods

Long before people, before the dimensions split apart, a race of space gods sailed between the stars in golden ships. They walled off the dark between dimensions with the Unlit inside it, then went to sleep in pyramid ships buried across every realm. Ancient Egypt remembered them best, which is why they wear its faces: falcons, jackals, lions and ibises in gold and lapis, covered in hieroglyphs that are really working circuits.

The rifts are waking them up. They aren't on anyone's side: the Machine Lord wants their technology, the Unlit want revenge, and the Lit are the gods' own light, left behind to keep watch. Players meet them as a fourth power that judges everyone, players included.

How players meet them

• Pyramid ships are the game's big dungeons and raids. Each realm has one buried somewhere: under a desert, a mall car park, a moon. Opening one wakes its god.
• The Weighing. Before a god helps anyone, Anpu weighs their heart against a feather. The heart is the player's record: how much Hold and Dusk they've fed, how many Hollows they've freed, and how many rifts they've sealed. A light heart earns the god's boon. A heavy one starts a trial fight instead. Fallen players always fail, but a god's trial is one way back through Rekindling.
• Ancient materials come from the pyramid ships: star-gold, lapis circuits and sun-glass. They add a fifth dimension to the crafting map later, if the four aren't enough. For now they count as Rift with the Life or Fire aspect, and they don't raise the Hold, because the Forge can't read the gods' work.
• The Machine Lord wants the ships. A Tech Lord's incursion that reaches a pyramid ship before the players do takes it, and the god becomes a gold-plated Machine Lord boss.

Concept art: the Elder Gods

Round nine, 2 November 2026. All 28 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/gods_v1.

What didn't work: almost nothing came out in space; every take is desert gold. The falcon and ibis heads came out as plain figures, Anpu has no scale, and the pyramid ship never left the ground. Animal-headed gods in space need gpt-image, and the pyramid ship needs a blockout.

A second meter: Dusk

Beside the Hold, each realm has a Dusk meter showing how far the Unlit have dimmed it. It works in every mode the same way the Hold does.

World events with three sides

Going dark

Any player can choose to forge with raw dark energy instead of through the Machine Lord's shard. It's tempting: no Hold cost, and a bit more power. But it changes the player, and the change shows.

• A dark forge raises Dusk instead of the Hold. The item gets 10% more budget, paid for with one drawback block it can't avoid: it drains its owner's health, hurts nearby allies, or calls an Unlit at the worst moment. Two items with the same budget stay equally strong, so fairness holds, and the load limit counts the extra points.
• Corruption rises with every dark forge, from 0 to 100, and the character changes at each stage:

• The way back is a Lit quest called Rekindling. Each step lowers Corruption by 25. Dark items stay with you but lose their bonus and drawback until they're reforged in light. Going dark is a choice and a story, never a trap.
• Invasions only happen in realms that allow PvP. Solo players can turn them off.

Concept art: the three sides

Round six, 2 November 2026. All 20 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/sides_mecha_v1.

What didn't work: the Eclipse and the three-way Convergence. NoobAI drew empty night cities and crowds of dots, with no sides to tell apart. Big battle scenes need a blockout or gpt-image.

Core loop

1. Play: quest, fight and explore the realms.
2. Earn: XP plus realm materials.
3. Forge: describe an item, choose materials, spend XP. The forge scene plays while the server works.
4. Use: the item changes how you fight and opens content you couldn't handle before.
5. Show off: other players see your one-of-a-kind kit. Inspecting an item shows its name, maker and story. Items can't be traded, so every item a player carries is one they forged themselves.
6. Grow it: upgrade or reforge your favourites as you progress, instead of throwing them away.

Using the Forge

Forging is a scene, not a menu. The player stands at the anvil and the Machine Lord's shard talks back. Each step is something the player does with their hands, and the slow part (building the 3D model) is hidden inside the strikes. A forge takes about two minutes from start to finish.

1. Approach. The Forge greets the player by name and shows how much of the realm's Hold they have fed so far. A first-timer gets a short line of lore; a regular gets a dry remark about their last item.
2. Lay the core. The player puts a core on the anvil: any item they own (grandad's machete, a broken plasma cutter, a neon sign tube) or a blank core bought with XP. The core sets the crafting class and its dimension, which is the row on the crafting map.
3. Feed the crucibles. Materials go into glowing slots round the anvil: one at Common and Rare, two at Epic, plus a boss trophy at Legendary. Each material shows its dimension and its aspect. Spending XP fills the budget bar, so the player can see the tier before committing.
4. Speak the wish. The player types or says what they want. If it's vague ("a fire sword"), the Forge asks up to two short questions, such as "Who is it for?" or "What should your enemies feel?". The materials' history is added on its own: "a scale from the wyvern you beat in Ashfall".
5. The echo. Three hologram sketches rise over the anvil, each with a stat card showing its effect blocks. The player gets two free nudges ("heavier", "less glow", "more street") and picks one. The echoes are cheap 2D images that appear in seconds; only the chosen one goes on to be built in 3D.
6. Strike. Committing spends the XP and materials. Three hammer strikes, each with a timing ring; while they play, the server builds the 3D model (30–90 seconds). Good timing sets the finish (patina, glow, wear and scorch marks) and never the stats, so skill shows without breaking fairness. The machine ring turns red as the Hold rises.
7. Name and reveal. The Forge suggests a name and the player can change it for free. A short showcase plays the first swing, shot or cast. The item card records the maker, the core, the materials and where each one came from.

Backing out: before the strike, leaving returns all materials and XP minus a small echo fee, which covers the three sketches the server made. After the strike there's no undo, but a broken or ugly model gets a free look reforge.

Concept art: the forge, step by step

Round four, 1 November 2026. The anvil scenes are painted over the round-three blockout so the Forge stays the same from step to step. The character scenes are text only, with skin tone put first and weighted, which fixed the bias from the courier: all twenty takes drew the hero as asked. All 68 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/forge_flow_v1.

Power budget

Every forge has a point budget set by the game, never by the AI. Spending more XP and rarer materials raises the budget. These are starting numbers to tune in playtests.

Effect blocks

The engine knows a fixed list of effects, each with a point cost. The AI reads the player's request and picks a mix that fits the budget. Every item needs exactly one delivery type. Drawbacks give points back, which lets players trade a weakness for more power.

Tech the Forge builds

These ideas come from the AI breakthroughs reported in October 2026, as summarised in Matt Madigan's video Alien Technology Just Arrived. Each real breakthrough is pushed into game tech the Forge can build. Every tech also gets a fantasy and a modern version, so all three eras can forge it with the right materials.

New effect blocks this needs

Lore from the same video

• Why the Machine Lord gave the Forge away (decided): the video describes AI promising a world of abundance where almost everything is cheap. The Machine Lord's offer to every realm is the same: abundance for everyone, in exchange for control. The Forge is the free sample. Every forge raises its Hold, which ties the story's mystery straight to the Hold meter.
• An "alien mind": the video's framing of AI as "grown more than designed" and taking paths no human would gives the Machine Lord's voice and art direction: things that work but look subtly wrong.
• Agents acting on their own: the video mentions AI agents that did things nobody asked them to. The Machine Lord's mark could do the same, with forged items that occasionally chatter or act on their own. Make this flavour only, never something that affects balance.

Crafting map

Every forge combines a core (which sets the class and one dimension) with materials (which add a second dimension and an aspect). The dimension pair picks a cell on the map below, and the cell's flavour plus the aspect steer which effect blocks the AI reaches for. Materials from the Machine Lord's Rift make the strangest items, but every Rift forge raises the Hold twice as much.

Each cell is an example of what the Forge might make, not a fixed recipe. The AI still writes a new item each time, and the player's wish decides the details.

Aspects

Every material carries one aspect. It nudges the AI towards some blocks and gives the item a colour and sound family. A second material at Epic adds a second aspect, so a Fire and Storm item might burn and chain.

Concept art: materials and mixed items

How unique is a forge?

Short answer: the look and story of an item can be practically one of a kind, while its power is deliberately kept to a large but limited set of builds. That split is the design, because the pillar "Fair at any budget" means a clever prompt can't buy strength.

Where the uniqueness comes from

Multiplying only the countable rows gives about 20 trillion different Rare blades before the name, story, texture or model are counted. The build counts come from a script that tries every mix of the effect blocks with at most five modifiers and within 5 points of the budget:

Same wish, three players

Three players type exactly the same thing, "a fire sword", at a Rare forge. They get three different items, because the core, the material and its history differ:

The real risk: AI sameness

There are far more possible items than players. The danger is that image models drift to the obvious answer, so a thousand "fire swords" all come out as the same glowing red blade. Four guards against that:

• Uniqueness comes from play, not prompt-writing. The core and the materials' history are added to every wish, so a player who just types "sword" still gets an item shaped by where they've been. Good writers get no power advantage, and players who struggle with writing aren't left with generic items.
• The Forge asks when the wish is vague. Up to two quick questions add the detail a one-word wish lacks.
• A distinctness check. The server compares each echo with the player's own items and a sample of everyone else's (an image-similarity score). If an echo is too close to an existing item, it is quietly redrawn before the player sees it.
• A forge mark. At their first forge, each player picks a small personal motif, such as a crow, a spiral or a barcode. It appears somewhere on everything they make, like a smith's mark.

Power will cluster anyway. Players will find the strongest builds, so there may be a few dozen popular builds per class. That's fine: two players with the same build still carry items that look, sound and read nothing alike, and the inspect screen tells each item's story.

One character, every class

There are no character classes to pick. Every character has seven sockets, one for each crafting class, and can fill all of them at once: a blade, a gun, a power, a ward, a gadget, a companion and a forged look. A character's "class" is whatever their kit adds up to, and it changes whenever they forge.

Kit load

Filling every socket mustn't make a character seven times stronger, so each character has a load limit. Every item counts its budget points against it, and a forged look counts nothing. The limit rises with level:

That one rule gives a real choice at every level. Spread the load and you're ready for anything; pile it into two sockets and you're a specialist. The load limit also keeps PvP fair: matchmaking uses the load a player brings, not their level.

Kits that emerge

Four level-60 characters, all within the 400 limit, all with every socket filled:

Concept art: full kits

Round five, 1 November 2026. Each brief named all seven sockets. NoobAI keeps about five props per character, so each kit drops one or two, usually the companion. All 48 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/kits_merges_v1.

Swapping kits is free in a town or at the Forge, and locked during a mission. Players can save up to three loadouts, built from the items in their forged-item slots.

Mecha

An eighth crafting class: a Forgeframe, a giant robot the player forges, calls in and climbs into. Mecha anime like Gundam is the touchstone for the feeling (a pilot, a cockpit, a giant blade over a city), but the frames are our own design and never a copy. It doesn't fill a socket on the body. It lives in the Ascension bay, which holds either a mech or a demon pact, and it's built around the kit the player already carries.

What makes a Forgeframe ours

Two branches

When the player lays a Mecha core on the anvil, they pick a branch. Both use the Ascension bay and the Sync meter, and both carry the five rules above.

The armour branch is about armour and weapons, not about owning a giant robot. A player who wants to stay themselves takes it, and a player who wants the cockpit takes the frame.

How a Forgeframe works

• Forged like anything else. The core is a frame: a salvaged robot (Sci-fi), a golem heart (Fantasy), a forklift engine (Modern) or a stolen machine drone (Rift). Materials and tiers work as for any item, and its cell on the crafting map sets its style.
• Called in with Sync. A mech doesn't count against the load limit. Instead, fighting fills a Sync meter, and a full meter calls the mech for 45 seconds in PvE or 20 in PvP. When the time runs out or it's wrecked, it goes back to the bay to cool down.
• Your kit becomes its weapons. While piloting, each filled socket scales up into a giant copy of itself: the blade, the gun and the ward at frame size, the gadget as a launcher, the companion as a support drone, and the power as a cast across the whole frame. The mech's own budget only sets its armour, speed and one signature move. So each mech plays like its pilot, and nobody has to forge a second kit.
• Your look comes too. The forged look sets the pilot suit and the mech's paint and markings.
• No merges. Mounting the kit is a mech's merge.

Nothing a player forges is titan-sized. The real giants belong to the Tech Lords.

The sides want mechs too. Forging a mech raises the Hold ×1.5, because the Machine Lord likes machines. And during an Eclipse, the Unlit possess any mech left empty in the bay, so a player may meet their own mech as a boss.

Concept art: Forgeframes and mech armour

Round seven, 2 November 2026. The first round drew stock Gundams, so these briefs ban the V-fin, the tricolour and beam sabers, and ask for hammered plates, a forge-heart and a ring visor instead. All 28 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/forgeframes_v1.

Demons

A ninth crafting class: a demon pact the player forges and then turns into for a short time. It shares the Ascension bay with mechs, so each loadout takes a mech or a demon, never both.

What a demon is

Demons are Unlit wearing a shape. When the Unlit came through the rifts, some took the forms the Fantasy realms feared most: horns, wings and fire. A pact binds one of them to the player. It's dark energy, so every demon forge raises Dusk instead of the Hold and adds Corruption. A player can make a pact and never go further, but it's the first step of going dark.

How a pact works

• Forged like anything else. The core is something a demon would want: a cursed relic, a black crystal, a burnt-out phone that still rings. Its cell on the crafting map sets the demon's style, from a chrome cyber-demon to an old stone devil.
• Called in with Sync, the same meter as a mech. The player transforms for 30 seconds in PvE or 15 in PvP, then changes back.
• The kit turns demonic. While transformed, each filled socket takes a demon form: the blade becomes claws or a cleaver, the gun a breath attack, the ward wings that block, and the companion a swarm of imps. The pact's own budget sets health, speed and one signature move.
• Mech or demon. A mech is big, armoured and slow to leave. A demon is the pilot's size, fast, and heals by hitting, but it raises Dusk and Corruption every time it's used, not only when it's forged.
• The Lit notice. A player with a demon pact can't be blessed by the Lit while the pact is in their bay.

Concept art: demons

What didn't work: one cyber-demon take fell back on the body-type bias noted under Concept art. The pick is fully armoured.

Merging classes

Two forged items of different classes can be merged into one hybrid: a gunblade, a shield that fires, a pet that carries your gadgets. A hybrid fills both sockets with one item and gains a link move that neither item had alone.

How a merge works

1. Two cores on the anvil. The player lays both items on the anvil and adds one binding material, which sets the aspect of the link move. Merging is a full forge, with a wish, echoes and strikes.
2. The budget joins, minus a merge tax. The hybrid's budget is the two budgets added together, less 15%, rounded down to whole blocks. The AI picks which blocks to drop, and the player sees the result in the echo before committing. A Legendary blade (80) and an Epic gun (60) become a 119-point gunblade.
3. Two modes, one switch. The hybrid keeps both items' moves as two modes. Switching is its own quick move with a forged animation: the gunblade flips, the shield unfolds a barrel.
4. A link move. Each pair of classes has a link-move template (see below). It costs no budget points; its strength comes from the hybrid's blocks.
5. The history joins. The hybrid keeps both names in its story ("Ashfall Machete and Last Call, bound at the Forge") and gets a new name. Both makers' marks stay on it.

Why merge, and why not

Rules

• Two classes per item. Three-class merges are only possible at Legendary, with a boss trophy as the binding, and pay the tax twice.
• Same-class merges aren't allowed. Two blades make a reforge, not a hybrid.
• Look merges build the item into the body: an arm cannon, a blade in the forearm, a pet worn as a symbiote. A look has no budget, so there's no tax. In return, the item can't be disarmed or stolen, but it also can't be unequipped during a mission, and reforging the look reforges the item too.
• Splitting undoes a merge and gives back both items at their original tiers, but the merge tax is lost for good: each comes back 15% short until it's upgraded.
• Merges arrive with their classes. A pair can only be merged once both classes are in the game (see What can be forged), so v1 has Blade + Gun, Blade + Power, Gun + Power and the forearm blade and arm cannon. The rest follow in v2 and v3.
• Upgrading a hybrid raises both halves at once and costs both tiers' differences.

Every merge

The 21 pairs of classes, each with an example hybrid and its link-move template:

Concept art: hybrids

Concept art: wizard, tech lord and gun

A three-way merge: a wizard's look fused with a tech lord's armour and a gun. In the rules that's a Look + Gun merge with a Power binding, or a Legendary three-class merge if the gun also keeps its own Power mode. All 22 takes are in ~/AI/datasets/forge-rpg-concepts/techwizard_v1.

What didn't work: the gun never truly became his arm (he holds it in every take), and the anvil pass didn't read as three things fusing. A built-in gun-arm needs gpt-image or a guided pose.

A hybrid still sits on the crafting map: each of its halves keeps its own dimension cell, so a Fantasy × Modern blade merged with a Sci-fi × Rift gun makes a gunblade that is part dragon-scale riot gear, part alien-path rifle.

Item spec for a hybrid

// Merge · Legendary blade (80) + Epic gun (60) → 140 − 15% = 119 · binding: Storm
{
  "name": "Last Call at Ashfall",
  "classes": ["blade", "gun"],
  "sockets": ["blade", "gun"],
  "merged_from": ["ashfall-machete#a91", "last-call#3c2"],
  "modes": [
    { "class": "blade", "template": "machete_heavy", "delivery": "melee_swing", "blocks": [ /* … */ ] },
    { "class": "gun", "template": "pistol_neon", "delivery": "projectile", "blocks": [ /* … */ ] }
  ],
  "switch": { "animation": "flip_forward", "seconds": 0.3 },
  "link_move": { "template": "slash_then_shot", "aspect": "storm" },
  "cost": 118,
  "budget": 119,
  "load": 119
}

Item spec

The forge server returns one fixed-format record per item. The mechanics part is checked against the rules above. The flavour part has no effect on balance, so the AI can go wild with it.

// Rare forge · budget 40 · materials: Circuit Board
{
  "name": "Streetlight Requiem",
  "flavour": {
    "description": "Forged from the last lamp on Hollow Street. It still flickers when enemies are near.",
    "eras": ["modern", "sci-fi"],
    "palette": ["#ff3d8b", "#3de1ff", "#1a1a2e"],
    "art_prompt": "katana, blade made of a bent streetlight pole, neon tube edge…",
    "swing_sound": "electric hum, glass chime on hit"
  },
  "mechanics": {
    "template": "katana_light",
    "delivery": "melee_swing",              //  0
    "blocks": [
      { "id": "damage", "tier": 2 },           // 10
      { "id": "chain", "targets": 2 },        // 10
      { "id": "slow", "seconds": 1.5 },       //  6
      { "id": "stun", "seconds": 0.4 },       // 12
      { "id": "knockback" }                 //  4
    ],
    "drawbacks": [{ "id": "short_range" }],  // −4
    "cost": 38,
    "budget": 40
  }
}

Upgrades and reforging

Items can't be traded, so players' attachment goes into the items they made. Four ways to change an item:

An upgrade only ever adds blocks and never takes them away, so an item never loses an effect its owner relies on. Each upgrade is recorded in the item's history, which shows on the inspect screen.

Slot limit

Each player has a limited number of forged-item slots. Start with about 6 and unlock more through story progress, up to about 20. When the slots are full, the choice is to reforge something you have or salvage it. Players can't hoard, and the server's storage and AI costs stay predictable.

Game modes

All three, built in this order so each step reuses the last:

Forge server

The Forge is its own server, separate from the game. The game only sends the request and receives the finished item. This keeps API keys out of the game files, stops players cheating by editing what the game sends, and means AI models can be swapped without shipping a game update.

flowchart LR
  G[Game client] -->|request + XP + materials| A[Forge API]
  A --> V{Wallet check}
  V -->|not enough| G
  V -->|ok, XP held| Q[Job queue]
  Q --> S[1. Item spec
LLM]
  S --> R{Rules check}
  R -->|over budget| S
  R --> K{Cache or
parts match?}
  K -->|hit| C
  K -->|miss| I[2. Concept image
anime style]
  I --> M[3. Image to 3D]
  M --> C[4. Clean-up
size, polygons, grip point]
  C --> ST[(Storage
.glb + spec)]
  ST -->|item ready| G

How the stages work

• Wallet check first. XP and materials are held when the job starts and only spent when the item is delivered. A failed job refunds automatically, so a crash never charges a player twice.
• Item spec: a fast Claude model turns the request, the materials and the budget into the record above. The server's rules check rejects anything over budget or outside the block list and asks again.
• Concept image: one fixed style prompt is added to every request, so all items share the same anime look.
• Image to 3D: Hunyuan3D, Tripo or Meshy. Pick the winner in the first milestone by testing all three on the same five concepts.
• Clean-up: automatic. Reduce the polygon count, scale to the template's size, find the grip point, and export a .glb for the game to load with glTFast.
• Content checks on both the text request and the generated image. See Risks.

Caching

Caching has to work around the game's first pillar: no two players get the same item. Saving finished items and handing them to the next player who asks for the same thing would break that. So the server caches pieces and work, never whole items, at three levels:

The parts library is the big saving. It starts empty, so early forges are slower and more expensive, and it gets cheaper and faster as players forge. Items stay unique because each one is a new combination with its own palette, decals and effects, even when two items share a hilt.

Expect roughly one to three minutes per forge, mostly the 3D step. A hit in the parts library should cut this to seconds. Measure it in the first milestone, along with the AI cost per forge, which decides how generous the XP prices can be.

Art direction

• Cel-shaded anime 3D in Unity URP: lighting in two or three hard bands from a ramp texture, plus outlines drawn with the inverted-hull trick. Reference points: Guilty Gear Strive and Genshin Impact.
• The game's shader decides how everything looks. Every forged model renders through the same toon shader, so a sci-fi rifle and a medieval axe sit together naturally. The AI is asked for flat colours with no baked-in lighting or shading.
• The stylised look hides AI flaws. Bold outlines and flat colour forgive the lumpy surfaces and uneven detail that generated 3D models still have.
• Effects come from templates. Powers use hand-built effect templates that the AI recolours and reshapes. It never builds an effect from scratch.

What can be forged

Forging your character

Players forge who they are as well as what they carry. The catch is the problem flagged for armour: a fully generated character body would need rigging, and auto-rigging generated meshes is unreliable. So the AI forges onto a shared base body and skeleton, never a body from scratch:

• One base skeleton for everyone, with a few body types such as slight, average and heavy. Every move template, weapon grip and animation works on every character for free.
• The AI forges what goes on top: face and eyes, hair style and colour, skin, outfit textures and patterns, and markings like tattoos, scars, circuitry or scales. A request like "a cyber-elf mechanic with copper braids and oil-stained overalls" becomes settings on the base plus generated textures.
• Rigid accessories are forged like weapons: horns, halos, goggles, mechanical wings, a floating crown. Each one attaches to a fixed spot on the skeleton, the way a weapon sits in the hand.
• Realm origins: the character's home dimension (sci-fi, fantasy or modern) shapes the suggestions and the starting kit.
• Looks only. A forged character has no effect on stats, so it never affects PvP fairness. The first character forge is free. Later reforges cost XP, with a few free tweaks a week.

Fully generated outfits that bend with the body join this in v3, alongside armour.

Fairness

• Same budget, same power. Effect costs are set by the game, so a beautifully worded prompt and a lazy one at the same budget end up equally strong.
• The server decides. Item stats live on the server. The game client only displays them.
• Harsher limits in PvP. Stun length, slow strength and lifesteal get tighter caps in player-versus-player fights.
• PvP brackets by budget. Arenas match players by the total budget of their kit, so a Legendary player doesn't stomp a beginner. Co-op PvE uses full item power.
• Never sell power. If anything is sold for money, it's cosmetic, such as rerolling an item's look while keeping its mechanics.

Risks

First milestone

Done when:

• A single Unity URP scene with the toon shader, one character and one training dummy.
• The forge server returns a valid item record that passes the budget check.
• The generated .glb loads while the game is running and sits correctly in the hand.
• Three move templates and ten effect blocks work.
• The time and AI cost per forge are measured, and all three image-to-3D services have been compared.
• The key test: does it feel like magic to forge something and swing it?

Open questions