Uncharted Game Generator

One click, one game. Each brief is built from the tags on 83,384 Steam games. Copy it as Markdown and hand it to your favourite LLM.

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Ingredients

🔒 keeps a slot through Generate · ↻ rerolls just that slot

Design brief

Game map

Every Steam game, placed near games with similar tags and store descriptions. Drag to pan, scroll or pinch to zoom, and click (or tap, then Generate from here) anywhere to generate a game from the tags its 30 nearest neighbours share.

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Distances on a 2D map are approximate; open spaces between clusters are not necessarily untapped niches.

Uncharted territory

1,502 setting + mechanic + mood combinations and 534 tag pairs appear in no Steam game, even though independent tags predict they should. 7,726 combinations that at most 40 developers have shipped also do (or are predicted to do) at least 1.25× better than their tags alone; Uncharted mode draws from the 2,786 with the biggest lifts. The biggest of all:

Commercial

  1. Medieval + Horses · 3.3× · 24% hit rate, 24 developers
  2. Mars + Linear + Thriller · 3.2× · 13% hit rate, 2 developers
  3. Futuristic + Combat + Emotional · 3.2× · 16% hit rate, 5 developers
  4. Level Editor + Violent · 3.1× · 34% hit rate, 30 developers
  5. Futuristic + Linear + Thriller · 3.1× · 11% hit rate, 5 developers
  6. Sci-fi + Stealth + Violent · 3.0× · 27% hit rate, 28 developers
  7. Capitalism + Violent · 3.0× · 25% hit rate, 18 developers
  8. Sci-fi + Choices Matter + Violent · 2.9× · 31% hit rate, 31 developers
  9. Robots + Real-Time · 2.9× · 20% hit rate, 7 developers
  10. Sci-fi + Tactical + Violent · 2.9× · 26% hit rate, 25 developers

Quality

  1. Interactive Fiction + World War II · 1.7× · 47% hit rate, 7 developers
  2. Auto Battler + Turn-Based · 1.6× · 26% hit rate, 27 developers
  3. JRPG + Modern · 1.6× · 34% hit rate, 23 developers
  4. Walking Simulator + Music-Based Procedural Generation · 1.6× · 34% hit rate, 4 developers
  5. Turn-Based + Wholesome · 1.6× · 42% hit rate, 9 developers
  6. Clicker + Satire · 1.6× · 43% hit rate, 10 developers
  7. JRPG + Parody · 1.6× · 41% hit rate, 12 developers
  8. Clicker + Wholesome · 1.6× · 44% hit rate, 14 developers
  9. Interactive Fiction + Minigames · 1.6× · 46% hit rate, 6 developers
  10. Mystery + Wholesome · 1.6× · 54% hit rate, 14 developers

Steam does not publish sales, so review counts stand in for them. A commercial hit has 1,000+ reviews; a quality hit has 90%+ positive reviews, among games with 50+ reviews. Only games released in 2016 or later are scored, and each developer counts once per combination. Lift compares a combination's hit rate with what a factorization machine predicts from its tags' individual effects; rates are shrunk towards the model (as if 20 more developers had shipped it), and combinations nobody has shipped are model predictions. Held-out log-loss, model vs tags alone: commercial 0.1688 vs 0.1713, quality 0.5249 vs 0.5289.