GDC 2024 is in full swing, and it looks like Inworld AI will be one of the hottest exhibitors at San Francisco’s convention of game makers.
Following yesterday’s unveiling of the Covert Protocol demo made in partnership with NVIDIA and their Avatar Cloud Engine (ACE) platform, Inworld AI takes center stage once again today with a slew of announcements.
To start with, Ubisoft presented NEO NPCs, their first prototype for generative AI powered characters and gameplay. NEO NPCs is powered by Inworld AI’s Character Engine and large language model technology, which allowed a Ubisoft team led by the Paris studio and supported by the Production Technology Department to build a full background, knowledge base, and conversational style for each NPC. The NEO NPCs prototype also leverages NVIDIA ACE, specifically its Audio2Face component, which enables real-time facial animation.
In the demo, players talk directly to NPCs with their voices. The non-player characters react in real time based on the conversation, allowing the NPC to unlock new story elements or even generate new quests on the fly. The NPCs possess a situational awareness that lets them react dynamically to points of interest; they can also share insights, ask questions, and plan actions.
Virginie Mosser, Narrative Director on the project, said:
My creative work has become much deeper since I get to work on their (NEO NPCs) psychology. I have to give them a soul and do so with a certain finesse that we have never before allocated to NPC creation. As a writer, seeing my characters come to life and actually converse with me for the first time has been one of the most fulfilling and touching moments of my career.
Xavier Manzanares, Director and Producer of the project, added:
It could be the start of a fantastic paradigm shift. For the first time, the game world actually listens to and dynamically responds to the players. Social interactions and skills become part of the gameplay. Smarter NPCs like our NEO NPCs have the potential to become a breakthrough addition to the traditional NPCs we see in games today. They provide the ability to create even more immersive worlds and emergent stories.
Guillemette Picard, Senior Vice President of Production Technology at Ubisoft, stated:
Generative AI brings unprecedented creative opportunities for our teams and players. It is when they find the value it has for them that we start to see its true potential to transform the way games are made and played.
It will take a while yet before the technology can be implemented in an actual game, but Ubisoft clearly believes this is the future, and they’re not the only ones.
At GDC 2024, Inworld AI and Microsoft’s Xbox are also presenting the generative AI-powered toolset they announced a few months ago. It’s called Narrative Graph and it allows game developers to upload documents like scripts to generate a branching graph of the narratives, alongside character profiles and their respective knowledge. Narrative Graph can even generate ideas for brand new story beats or dialogue based on the script. Of course, it’s also possible to add fully AI-enabled NPCs based on the Inworld AI Character Engine.
To demonstrate Narrative Graph, Inworld created Mists of Aurora, a prototype featuring three scenes of a text-based narrative game inspired by tabletop RPGs. Thanks to the AI-powered narrator and mechanics, every playthrough is different, though the tool still manages to ensure that the overarching story remains consistent.
Inworld AI isn’t just working with the likes of Ubisoft and Microsoft, though. They are demoing several indie titles that take advantage of their technology, including Avalon (the MMO that we previously featured in a long interview with Jeffrey Butler), the hack-and-slash action RPG Eternium, the slap-stick action comedy arena fighting game Get Slapped, the community-driven RPG Cloudborn, and the sci-fi action drama Aria One.
Inworld AI will also present a couple of sessions at GDC to showcase their technology. Hopefully, these talks will become publicly available at a later time.
