The development of AIs has been very present over the last decade, and honestly I've been very fascinated by how they work. The fact that more and more are developed with human emotion and functionality, while also making minimal errors unlike us, is a very interesting development to our society today. With more and more mediums using AIs and online Chatbots to help with customers, keep up with daily life and even play games, it seems the age of talking to one another will at some point cease to exist. After all, why would you need to guess someone else's reaction when an AI is there who'll develop into the person you'd want to talk to?
But! This isn't what we're here to talk about!
As more apps and widgets are being developed today, they give new variety into our daily lives. Chatbots like Mitsuku and Replika provide us with company and someone to talk to, while also being able to help us out mentally. In games, CPUs provide us an opponent to challenge and fight while your friends were busy, or if you were unable to afford to go online (like nowadays... I can relate to this). NPCs also added variety by shaping the worlds we play in, like Assassin's Creed or Skyrim, allowing us to get attached to fictional people more than usual. However, what if you didn't want such a linear story with linear characters? A game developing itself without the need to join a DnD game?
Well, seemingly Latitude had a similar thought, and May 2019, the first instalment of AI Dungeon came to life. It did get improved software and made into an app in December 2019, and since then, it's been developed more and more to improve the AI they already created. I remember the first time I played it on my phone in December (a very odd find that day). You could tell there were some major flaws as the AI wasn't very incoherent, but it was progress no one else had touched on. Each new adventure was randomised, with more and more scenarios piling up and more reactions to different scenarios came around.
They started to put update memos on the AI dungeon app and website whenever you came back to play, starting March 26th 2020. Since then, they've been able to show more content and test out more engines thanks to the millions of people that play it often, or browse it once in a while. I remember earlier this year when they asked for support from their audience to help the new system recognise certain situations or certain characters. I was more than happy to sit at my laptop and pick stuff out, waiting and hoping to see what they'd come up with next. It kept me sane during lockdown too as I was able to continue with it whenever I got a free 5 minutes.
It's been about a month since I picked it up and I must say... it feels and looks a lot better than when they've started. A major glow up. One of the first new things I see while starting up a game is that there's quest objectives to complete. I remember them mentioning this feature during the community helping phase, so seeing how it's been implemented was a really nice surprise. The AI itself is listening a lot more to what I type, responding to the prompts I give it. There are one or two hiccups, but luckily the reset button was working as intended and changed it to something that made sense. Everything seemed to work really well on the interface when I tried to make my own story. Another cool feature was when this menu popped up:
This is a cool way to help develop the game, while also letting everyone pitch in. It was honestly easy to fill in and even let you opt out at any time which is extremely cool. It made me happy to know they're improving every day with their AI.
Now to explore the menus!
Honestly, they've changed so much (especially since I didn't use them as much as I would normally). There's featured scenarios from the most popular at the time, multiplayer to create a story with more than one person, and you can even join other people's live stories. The world's section is what really intrigues me too as there's different settings and lores to follow, which is amazing to me for a system that's supposed to be randomly generated being able to follow stuff like this. The only thing I can't say much about is the premium stuff, such as the Dragon AI and the features that'd be exclusive to that (hopefully just for the time being), but what they offer in that seems pretty decent. However, the good news is they don't enforce a pay to play border on this, so you can enjoy everything without even paying, which is always a bonus.
Overall, this is something I've loved seeing develop overtime, and I've never got bored of it enough to delete the tab off of my bookmarks (It's literally one of the first to hand). Maybe at some point, I could perhaps share some of my creations on here, but who knows. If you were curious to try this, the website is here:
Now to follow my next adventure with Flank the Detective
-R (27/10/2020)
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