Riding the wave of experimenting with the latest in technologies, this time around, I thought I’d spend a short time making a toy/figure and game for my son’s 6th birthday. My son loves the memory (matching) card game, and dinosaurs, so I thought I’d have one thrown together for him. Then, I thought it’d be cool to include it as a link from a 3d printed Spinosaurus on an NFC chip (qr backup for tablets).
To steer completely clear of any licensing issues, I decided to use all AI tools for generating the different pieces I needed. I used Bambu’s MakerLab to create a spinosaurus 3d model based on an initial cartoony drawing I had chatgpt create. After a bit of back and forth and fighting with a few issues related to toe/claw (yeah, AI still isn’t perfect there) and too much color, I found the cleanest path to be to have a black and white drawing with the dinosaur directly facing the “camera” as the source image, and then let the 3d model creator do it’s thing. I think it turned out pretty good.
There are definitely some things I would change, and this has served as another reason for me to return to my Blender battles to sharpen my skills there, but at the size it was going to be printed, it was good enough to move forward. Also, I opted for no color just to keep the print simple/fast since I was planning to print 20-30 of these.
Moving on, I then opened a chat on my phone, and while doing other things had it create me 12 different dinosaur drawings and a card back that I would later use for the matching game. When that was done, I downloaded them all, tossed them into a repo and put my “Senior Developer” on the job.
I hopped onto Codex (my “Senior Developer”), and explained what I needed. This time around, unlike the custom bunny game that loaded with the toy recipient’s name in a greeting, I kept this a bit more generic (everyone would get the exact same link), but I included a high score mechanism so kids could still have some “local friends” interactivity/competition. Admittedly, there’s nothing keeping anyone outside the party from playing the game, but I figured the obscurity of the url would be sufficient for this short term game. I had the application built to track the top 5 scores, and when you placed, you typed in your name. This was an interesting thought for me because I didn’t want to have it so open that some malicious actor could enter something inappropriate. That’s when I learned about purgomalum.com, which is a site with a GET endpoint that will return true or false if the text you pass in has profanity in it. Eg. https://www.purgomalum.com/service/containsprofanity?text=some%20text. It’s not flawless, the whitelist was not as comprehensive as I might want, but it’s not too bad and I hardcoded a few other terms into the app to avoid them getting through as well. Additionally, I had a back end admin portal built to clear scores/names so we could test leading up to the party and then clear them (or so I could quickly delete any inappropriate name that slipped through). Anyhow, in the course of a day, I was able to knock out a fun little game and a 3d spinosaurus linked up to hand out at my son’s party and I think the kids are going to like it.
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