Hermes can turn a childhood game idea into a top-tier mod

Transcript

Transcribed by machine (Whisper) from the episode’s audio, so a word may be off here and there.

1. 27:03

   i'm having fun with my army's agent i think one beautiful thing about army's agent is you can make your childhood dreams come true okay and so i'll tell you one of my childhood dreams there's a game maybe i'll share screen while i talk about it yeah please yeah okay there's a game called sonic adventure 2 it's a very popular classic dreamcast gamecube game from the from 2000 2000 2001 in it you have an artificial life system called the chow garden where you take care these little guys called chow um chow world you can you can kind of play with them i spent a decade playing this like more than that like i played this non-stop i was on the forums contributing and the chow's lore is that they come from this ancestral shrine location uh which is from a different game a different sonic game with this spinning emerald and emeralds next to it and this

2. 27:59

   beautiful beautiful open world space. This shrine that the Chow are said to come from is not an accessible location for you to actually play with the Chow. It's in a different game. I can't go to this shrine while Chow are there and engage with them there. That doesn't exist. So I went to Hermes Agent and And I said, hey, can you take the ancestral shrine from Sonic Adventure 1, completely rig it, animate it, bring it into Sonic Adventure 2, overwrite the map that Sonic Adventure 2 uses for its garden, rewrite all the spawn locations, everything, and add an NPC guardian, which never existed on this map, to caretake the chow for me.

3. 28:49

   literally rig and bone it and write the raw c to make all this happen and now i can show you we're gonna spin up the ancestral shrine mod on the shadow pc so we can showcase our progress with this garden for the people watching i think you can enable it in the sonic adventure mod manager and launch the game for me. Okay, so check it out. I just launched this, right? We're running an existing mod called the Extended Chow World that someone else made, but it doesn't make a map, right?

4. 29:29

   So just add some, like, animations. So it loaded us in what it said was the dark garden, which is one of the three chow gardens you can go into. When I walk through here to this open space, I can see up ahead there's a truck. And I can run up. And here I can see, there is an NPC called Chaos Zero, who is canonically the caretaker of the chow. But in this game, you can't have NPCs in the chow garden.

5. 30:05

   I've made one that has like a random walk, he stands in one place, you can do little animations wherever he goes, you can do a little idle animation in a sec. and he can pet the chow pick them up and take care of them as if he was there he's doing a little idle animation you can see him doing right there uh this water was rigged all like animated by hermes this emerald this master emerald with the glow effect and the spin is all added in those other emeralds spinning over there the seven chaos emeralds uh like this whole area still has all the features of a regular chow garden as well the departure machine etc etc trees to feed the chow so now i can say can you spawn in a chow so i can showcase that this is feature complete so this whole this whole tempo is not uh part of the default adventure 2 no this

6. 31:02

   temple is from a different game sonic adventure 1 it does not include all these assets rigged like this and it certainly does not have this npc that we've scripted in that harmony scripted and hard coded in uh you know so this is a this is a far larger map space than any of the other gardens which are really just not even the size of this shrine so we've really like pushed the boundaries of this game engine to do this um we've asked for uh chow to be spawned in yeah i had to so you see the sky around you this moving sky had to man like hermes had to add this skybox in there's a day and night cycle that it added in as well uh you know every single thing in here is like custom added in uh and like all of this was done in like c c sharp or something like this is like not simple stuff to do uh

7. 32:00

   Blender extension was used for a bunch of this to like model stuff, add it in, texture everything properly. You know, you're importing from a 1997 game into a 1999 game and a complex one. You're not reading a code for this stuff, right? You just probably try to see if it works. I don't even know how to code, man. Me? I'm just an alignment guy, man. And so, what was I saying? um yeah like you see it's turning from day into like evening afternoon like this this like sky box is changing the light cycle change like this is not these are not features that exist in the vanilla game so upon showing this mod to certain people within the uh the chow garden modding community which is actually quite large uh you know they're kind of blown away by the work saying This is a kind of better than 99% of the modders work.

8. 32:56

   This is like the top 1% of difficulty in art and modding community. Yeah. And so kind of hearing that and hearing that, like, when I've told these guys this was done with Hermes, that this was done with Claude, rather, they were shocked. And they said, you know, there's no way AI like Claude could do that. It doesn't know this kind of code. But with something like Hermes being able to learn from the documentation, learn from other mods, save to memory and skill, the things that allow it to understand these code bases, it was able to get into this niche and perform at the top 1% of modders.

9. 33:32

   That to me is like a sign of you can make your gaming dreams come true with Hermes AJ. Yeah, yeah, you can modify all the retro games you loved as a kid. Exactly, exactly. okay cool chow egg has been spawned we're gonna hatch the egg you need to shake it a little you