Wikipedia Quest

Written by Zach on April 10, 2008 — 10 Comments

Wikipedia Quest is my term project for a class I took in the Fall of 2007, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence. It is a cliche, dungeon crawler style RPG with retro graphics, with one catch: all of the content was created by an AI that skimmed Wikipedia. Using statistical linguistic processing, it attempts to fit the content it finds into a framework defined by a game grammar, which is then processed and saved into files that can be loaded into the game. The program also finds images for all content, resulting in an exciting game of somewhat random proportions.

Download the Paper (PDF)
Download WikipediA Quest (65.5 MB)

If you actually want to run the content generator, you’ll need to have the ImageMagick installed for image conversion (all images are downsampled to 200×150 with 3 bit color before using them in the game). It might not work for you, though, so you’re sort of on your own…

Download Source and Datafiles (32.1 MB)

The Wikipedia Quest title screen. Wikipedia Quest world map.

Wikipedia Quest combat screen.

10 Comments to “Wikipedia Quest”

You can follow all the replies to this entry through the comments feed.

  1. Haroldo's Gravatar Haroldo
    October 17, 2008 at 10:58 pm | Permalink

    The idea seems nice, but the installation file’s self-checking keeps telling it’s corrupted. I’ve re-downloaded it three times to be sure it wasn’t due to some connection problem.

  2. Aaron's Gravatar Aaron
    November 2, 2008 at 1:01 pm | Permalink

    And the installer actually is bugged; bypassing the start-time check via the /NCRC switch results in a failed install.
    Which is a shame, because this looks awesome.

  3. Zach's Gravatar Zach
    November 2, 2008 at 8:18 pm | Permalink

    I re-uploaded the game, so the above link should work now!

  4. Haroldo's Gravatar Haroldo
    November 3, 2008 at 8:48 pm | Permalink

    Okay, thanks, it works now.
    Slightly weird game, but that was expected. =)

  5. Aaron's Gravatar Aaron
    November 21, 2008 at 3:41 pm | Permalink

    Now that’s just awesome. Incredibly silly, sure, but awesome. Thanks, Zach!

  6. James's Gravatar James
    May 15, 2009 at 4:13 am | Permalink

    Oh god, I actually recognized the title theme. Surprised the AI got it out of Wikipedia. It’s called The Information Chase, by Bit Shifter.

  7. Zach's Gravatar Zach
    May 15, 2009 at 10:57 am | Permalink

    James: You’re right! Actually, all the music in the game is from that Bit Shifter album, and I picked it myself (not the AI).

  8. James's Gravatar James
    May 15, 2009 at 4:28 pm | Permalink

    Yeah, I noticed that after a couple more plays myself. It’s a pretty good album if you’re into chiptunes, I think it was fitting for this game.

  9. Robert's Gravatar Robert
    July 5, 2009 at 9:48 pm | Permalink

    Nice game, its sorta old now, and hard. I die on my second fight almost EVERY time. Fear the firefox!

  10. Midna's Gravatar Midna
    February 6, 2010 at 8:30 pm | Permalink

    Nobody else here noticed that the sprites are from NetHack?

«
»