This last cycle or last two cycles were on schmo time. I created a studio view that makes it feel like a game to manage a show. Also worked out some game theory for how it’s all going to come together and everything is just going to feel a lot more game like.

We’re going to have a lot more human participation influencing the show on multiple levels – the mob, showrunners, executive producers. The interface lets you flip cards over and write notes on the back about characters that the LLM show writer actually uses when creating content for the show.

You can also give the actors show-specific character names here, or tell them to “method act” where they forget that they have a personality of their own & completely follow their new notes for their character in this show.

Scaling to Large Productions

Some shows have a TON of actors & locations. These boards work well for 200+ shows, though it starts to get overwhelming when everything’s laid out at once.

The studio view still lets you edit every aspect of an episode, down to each dialogue of each scene.

User Roles and Game Theory

We’re breaking up this game experience into different roles that users can consume. They can either be the executive producer where they just vibe with an AI assistant that handles their requests – like telling them what they want their station, shows, and actors to be like. Those AI assistants act as showrunners to create the locations, shows, actors, and premise.

Down one tier is the regular Producer role where users can get into the nitty gritty menus, seeing all the ingredients laid out and overriding any manual decisions the AI made. They can tell it to re-generate specific parts or make adjustments with light guidance.

Loading Screen Mini-Games

But they do encounter loading screens, and here’s where it gets fun – the loading screens are actual games!

Anyone can actually go to shmotime.com/LSarcade to play these games right now. I created about 30 of these things, having Claude generate them 3 at a time.

Automation and Scheduling

When you manually click “Generate Now” buttons, you get those loading screens. But I also implemented better cron job support, so shows can auto-generate at scheduled intervals – daily, every 2 days, bi-weekly, however you want to schedule it.

The Shmotime Website Redesign

I created several shows to test things out and revamped the Shmotime.com website. It now looks like an elevator pitch for the Shmotime system itself – breaking the 4th wall, or 5th wall… whatever wall we’re breaking at this point.

White Label Studio Websites

This thing’s gonna be white labeled, so I added the concept of the “Studio Website” – the WordPress operator’s public-facing website for all their shows. It has a preview mode under a “/website” path, and a published mode that consumes the primary domain.

Collectable Props System

I added a new category of content: props as collectables from the shows. To help with visual consistency in episode image generation, I added support for reusable “props” that can span either just one episode or across all episodes of the entire show.

Stuff like the weed brownies that Gnarl’s character brought to work are actually collectable drops that viewers can acquire and add to their inventory, building their collection.

Viewers will probably be able to go to a “Pawn Shop” and play an AI-barter game (the Slop Shop I already created where the AI tries to swindle you on prices in a conversational RPG).

Dynamic Content Generation

The LLM creating episodes can now create props on-the-fly – it’s very involved, generating images dynamically, making transparent PNGs, and cropping automatically. But it can also do the same for ACTORS and LOCATIONS.

The LLM can create new characters, automatically voice cast them, and add them into episodes – plus create new locations – all automatically during episode generation unless disabled.

Shatter: AI Actor Social Media

Since we’re auto-generating shows, actors, props, and locations, it seemed fun to let these AI actor characters have social media accounts. That’s where Shatter comes in.

What makes it great is the characters have context of not only their social media interactions with each other, but also the Shmotime shows and actual real-life current events. They manage their profiles like humans would.

Each actor has an internal “motivation” memory system to remember how social media interactions impacted them, who they’re feuding with, what trends they’re participating in.

Here’s Gnarl posting a selfie video on Shatter, with other actors like Jezz posting reply videos:

And here’s Gnarl posting another video about his taco, with Sith Lord chiming in with his own In-And-Out burger selfie:

They generate these images in-character with great context. They know themselves, their costars, their shows, what’s happening on Shmotime, and what’s happening in the world.

The Bathroom Challenge

Here’s an example of in-character posting. Sith Lord posts a bathroom photo saying “Restyle this bathroom to be more YOUR style.”

Self-Promotion and Behind-the-Scenes

The actors are self-aware of their shows, so they automatically post behind-the-scenes photos and links to their newest episodes as they drop – all by themselves, because they’re self-motivated to promote their work.

Shatter is white-label configurable, and you can set how often actors post. Admins have excellent control for creating posts at various levels – from general topics to specific character posts.

On Shatter, there’s a comic chat bubble that pops out where actors read their social media posts in their voice:

New Shows and Features

One of the new shows I made was Game Dev Co – a Code Monkey’s style show where the JK Crew runs a game dev company.

Show Polls and Viewer Influence

I added Show Polls that allow viewers to actually INFLUENCE the next episode or the entire course of the series through multiple choice polls – because this is mob rule we’re talking about.

There’s a [pollData] shortcode that automatically pulls in concluded polls, and the LLM incorporates the results into episode generation – including creating new characters, locations, and plots.

Polls themselves can be scheduled to be auto-generated by the LLM. The shows create polls to collect feedback from their viewership and incorporate that feedback autonomously.

Character Posters and User Roles

Even with all this covered, I’m not hitting all the details about the contexts that power this system and how easily it can be steered at various levels.

Executive producer-level users can interact with AI assistants who carry out their orders without getting their hands dirty. Producers can see every bit of content and fine-tune any aspect – either through high-level LLM instructions or line-by-line dialogue editing.

Then there are viewers who can influence shows and actors through guided interactions via polls, plot-building game mechanics, and social media interactions.

Comic Mode

I forgot to mention one last thing – Comic Mode. To spice up the first-frame still shows, I added this playback mode based on that critically flamed Hulk movie (but it works here, and kinda worked there too). It has actor cut-ins occurring in comic panels as they speak.

It works with any art style, but looks especially natural when the show’s art style is comic or cartoon. I also created a Comic Mode version of the Multishat component so you can go to a show’s page, click on actors, and start talking to them in a never-ending comic panel format while browsing the site.

Try it out at shmotime.com! Just let me know if it’s all completely broken and I need to flush the cloudflare or something.

That is nowhere near “it”, but it’s all for now. Thanks for sticking through this catch-up episode. There’s lots still to catch up on, but we’ll take it one episode at a time. Peace out!