Building a Game Environment

With GPT-4 successfully integrated into Unity, the next question that came to mind was: “Where will these interactions take place?” If the companion was the brain of the project, the world needed to be the body - a space that grounded the player, offered moments for interaction, and allowed the AI companion to feel like part of a shared journey.

I needed a setting that would naturally support encounters, dialogue, rest, and moment - a space that felt alive and responsive, even if the world itself wasn’t the one doing the talking. A fantasy forest made sense for this. It’s quiet, mysterious, and filled with narrative potential. Pairing this with a turn-based RPG structure game me a format where player inputs could be intentional and meaningful - ideal for a system where GPT-4 reacts based on the structured decision-making of the player.

With limited amount of time and artistic skill, I knew I wouldn’t be building a world from scratch. I instead found a forest prefab pack on the Unity Asset Store that struck the right mood. It was soft, layered, and stylized enough to sell the atmosphere without overpowering the interactions or making the world feel empty. With the asset pack, I opted to build a parallaxing environment: where multiple image layers that move at different speeds are used to create the illusion of depth as the player walks through the scene.

Once the environment was in place, I wrote a basic side-scrolling movement script that lets the player walk left and right across the screen. As the camera pans, the layers of trees and brush shift subtly in the background, giving the world a sense of scale without requiring complex 3D modeling or extensive 2D art asset dependencies.

This forest will evolve with the project. Right now, it’s a corridor with atmosphere. Soon, it will be home to event triggers, campsites, strangers, combat encounters and the quiet conversations that shape a relationship. The AI has a brain, and now it has a place to walk beside you.