No judgment on good or bad, only encouragement for creation: this AI-native game allows everyone to enjoy storytelling

Text by Han Ren, Er Ji

By 2026, AI narrative games still have to face a core question: in the completely free text creation process, how on earth can players figure out what story they are supposed to tell?

Six years ago, when Book of 1001 Nights only had a preliminary demo built on GPT-2, producer Qisi had already started trying to answer this question. Now, after years of development and iteration, Book of 1001 Nights has finally built a set of "scaffolding" for players, helping them enjoy the fun of storytelling.

Book of 1001 Nights is one of the earliest domestic projects that tested AI-native narrative gameplay. Its story background is adapted from the classic text Arabian Nights. Players take on the role of Scheherazade, who accidentally unlocks the ability to turn weapons in text stories into physical objects during a story relay game with her sister. Players need to keep telling stories to the AI king to forge weapons, and finally kill the tyrannical king.

The game's Steam store page

Final duel scene

For a game that turns "AI dialogue" itself into gameplay, "getting players to speak up" is only the first step. What players say, how the AI understands their input, and how the game responds to players' creations are all questions that Book of 1001 Nights needs to address next.

Everyone can get joy from storytelling

The early DEMO of Book of 1001 Nights was called 1001 Nights, with a very simple experience:

The only thing players need to do is to tell stories to the AI king, naturally include descriptions of weapons in the stories, and finally use these weapons to defeat the king. In this process, the AI king will give feedback and guide the story based on his own character setting. A story with too obvious intentions may anger the king and directly trigger the execution ending.

Early game screenshot

Execution ending

For players who are already good at storytelling, the fun of the game is obvious: while outwitting the AI king, the act of creation itself is joyful. Telling a wonderful or absurd story also brings a strong sense of achievement.

But how to let players who are not good at storytelling, or who are tired of creating, also enjoy the fun of storytelling? Qisi says the answer is to build a good "scaffolding" for players.

First, the game needs to let players know how to start a story. The early DEMO only had a one-sentence prompt, but now the game adds an "inspiration card" system, which can directly use the experiences before entering the king's bedroom as the opening of the story. In addition, players who play multiple playthroughs can also choose the "storybook" feature to continue the unfinished story from their last run.

Interface of inspiration cards and storybook

The game also adds an "assistant name" feature. It came about when Qisi found that players would get much better content effects if they wrote people they know or familiar characters into the story, so they designed the feature to fit this behavior. At the Dice Con exhibition in Beijing, many players created stories with "Niu Lai" as the main character, drawing crowds of onlookers, and the related video got nearly 400 likes on Xiaohongshu.

Video taken at the exhibition site

With a smooth start, the game also needs to let players know what impact their narration is having. In the early version, the king's emotional state was semi-hidden, and players often did not realize that their actions had changed his state until the king got angry. Later the team found that the game did not need to score the text of the story, but could give points for the operations during storytelling, such as angering the king or cheering him up, or triggering multiple props in one sentence. Such clear feedback helps players understand what is happening in the game, so that they can be clearer about their next move.

Qisi says the goal of this design is not to encourage "good stories", but to encourage all "storytelling" behaviors. All these designs are meant to make players feel that storytelling itself is something fun, worthy of investment, and rewarding.

So Book of 1001 Nights is very tolerant of all kinds of "unconventional operations" from players. For example, if you write a word like "blade" into the "assistant name", you can easily make the king mention this name again and trigger the weapon.

The name Han Ren appears in the king's story

In Qisi's opinion, these behaviors do not necessarily need to be fixed as bugs. As long as a player can think of a way to use the system to produce unexpected results in the story, that is a kind of gameplay in itself, and part of the game's fun.

From "telling stories" to "playing stories"

The earliest version of Book of 1001 Nights was Qisi's research project during her PhD, and she even published a paper on it. But as the project grew larger and carried more content, it gradually evolved from an experimental demo to a complete game. This means the game needs a complete plot and worldview, to turn fragmented impromptu creations into game content with warmth, memorable points, and long-term value.

Qisi says the biggest mistake she made during development was underestimating the difficulty of writing the plot. Simply recreating the story of Arabian Nights is far from enough. Qisi hopes the heroine can be a "person who really existed", with her own life experience.

Scheherazade's childhood story

A large number of discarded drafts during the creation process made Qisi truly realize why the industry says "the second level of a game is the hardest to make". The team originally set the motivation for the heroine to assassinate the king as her sister encountering an accident, but this setting would make the sister lack independent personality. After repeated discussions with the screenwriter team, the team finally introduced the core setting of the curse seal, which gives more support to the heroine's resistance and redemption, and makes the overall story logic more rigorous and self-consistent.

After completing the worldview and character backgrounds, Qisi believes that the current Book of 1001 Nights is very much like a narrative game. In the follow-up plot, there will be all kinds of characters such as gardeners, doctors, and generals; the curse seal setting on the girls' wrists, the original intention of Scheherazade to embark on the road of redemption, all the foreshadowings and blank spaces will be revealed one by one in the plot.

In the story, curse seals will appear on the girls' hands. When the curse seal turns red, they will become the king's "brides".

Scheherazade and her childhood friend who wants to become a general

The team grew out of the game itself

Another special feature of Book of 1001 Nights is that as an AI-native game, it took shape step by step with the development of AI, witnessing this rapidly iterating AI era.

The earliest demo can be traced back to a project Qisi did during her university years six years ago, when GPT-2 was just becoming popular. The official development team of Book of 1001 Nights has only been established and operating for more than a year.

Team introduction

From an academic project to launching on Steam, the commercialization of Book of 1001 Nights does not have a clear "turning point". Qisi says it is more like a gradual growth. As large language models gradually mature, new ecology emerges in the industry, the team itself keeps growing, and the demo itself has gradually proved that it "deserves to be further developed".

Since there are no similar reference works, the project has no fixed development direction from beginning to end, and it is even difficult to define the game's genre. The team relies on player feedback to adjust and optimize the content bit by bit. In the early days, when the demo was still developed as an academic project, the team had studied functions such as real-time scene generation to give players stronger immersion and feedback. But later they found the effect was not good, and the player acceptance was not high, so they cut off these functions directly. Qisi says such decisions are mostly made after continuous communication with players.

The cut real-time scene generation feature

Similarly, the production team of this game is also different from most independent game studios. Qisi describes the team as "growing slowly as the game is perfected", instead of following the conventional path of project approval, raising investment, development and release.

The development of AI technology has also changed the team's workflow. Now non-technical personnel in the team can also make gameplay demos through vibe coding, and even directly complete the development of some small functions. The team has formed a working method of "show me the demo": when the planner puts forward new requirements, they will first make a demo for the programmers, simplifying the communication and development process.

This is exactly the most special part of this work: the game, the team, and the technology grow at the same time, forming the core background of the Book of 1001 Nights project. The AI-native game track is a brand new field with no mature references or fixed directions. Project updates, team building, and technology iteration are carried out simultaneously, influencing each other and taking shape together.

Talking about her views on the AI industry, Qisi says that if you are not a technology optimist, you probably will not be willing to deeply engage in AI-native entertainment. She believes that the cost of tokens will continue to decrease in the future, AI technology will continue to progress, and the entire track has much room for development. In Qisi's opinion, compared to competition, all kinds of AI-native games at the present stage are more like accompanying each other and growing together.

This article was first published on "36Kr Games".