All the stories in AI Dungeon are AI-generated, and the studio assures that their technology could dramatically lower development costs for AAA titles in the future.
Latitude, a studio that developed AI Dungeon, managed to raise $3.3 million in seed funding. The round was led by NFX whose partner James Currier thinks that Latitude is “already by far the leading AI games company.”
AI Dungeon was first introduced as a hackathon project and received no recognition. However, its creator Nick Walton continued to develop the game and released its first version in 2019.
AI Dungeon uses GPT-3 to produce text and is currently available on PC, iOS, and Android. According to the studio, the project has around 1.5 million monthly active users.
Unlike typical text games, AI Dungeon doesn’t have prewritten stories. Instead, it uses AI to generate literally countless plotlines. The game has numerous settings to choose from, but a player can start a custom adventure in their own genre.
AI reacts to users’ commands and texts, including sentences and even single words. It allows AI Dungeon’s community to experiment and create unique experiences, including multiplayer stories, own realms, or even sketches in the vein of Monty Python.
Walton thinks that this technology could help developers of AAA titles in the future. He points out that using AI-generated content could create worlds with “tens of thousands” of unique characters and reduce the development costs “from more than $100 million to less than $100,000.”
“You can have worlds that are dynamic, that are alive, rather than something like World of Warcraft, where you’ve got 10 million people who are doing the same quest,” Walton said, according to TechCrunch.
However, Latitude is now far away from reaching such an ambitious goal. AI Dungeon is good at generating texts, but not graphics or other complex gameplay mechanics. The studio is about to use the investment to hire more AI engineers and scale AI Dungeon as a gaming platform.