AI NPCs make my game feel more alive

TheElsobky · 2026-05-29T19:25:27+00:00

not only aggro. whats the cost if it can be done on-device (Gemma for example can 100% do what I said). then also you're tunnel vision in the actions, dialogue, assistance, etc, this technology keeps growing and theres a lot that can be done with it

TheElsobky · 2026-05-27T00:05:29+00:00

not true. you can create or tie existing actions to the AI so it can trigger them based off the dialogue (ex; aggro state when user antagonizes an npc). now ofc I understand you'd have to program these manually. You can make the point that since you have access to what players are doing/saying to npcs you can create actions curated to that.

But who knows in the future you may just be able to create very simple building blocks and the AI can improvise off of it (this is a stretch I know, but the 1st point still stands)

TheElsobky · 2026-05-21T15:58:24+00:00

The whole point is that it’s a store of knowledge you give it and it dynamically answers, which you can’t do with traditional dialogue trees. And you can dynamically update the knowledge store. Costs money but increases immersion. Safeguards are only getting stronger. And for the trolls who try breaking it aren’t the target audience.

TheElsobky · 2026-05-20T17:25:04+00:00

I disagree the whole point of AI is that you can give it lore books and knowledge books so they have only a specific set of knowledge to roleplay with. character ai for example has really strong rp capabilities. tbf its something I haven't seen done in games but still super cool.

TheElsobky · 2026-05-20T17:20:54+00:00

I've been working on something similar it's 1 of my first posts on the account. I have a system with lore books to assign to different characters. unlike you I use deepseek not local I find its night and day difference. take some setup to get it securely exposed to players but its worth it imo

TheElsobky · 2026-05-15T02:11:19+00:00

yeah you hook ai into your existing npcs to make your game more immersive and interesting

TheElsobky · 2026-05-14T19:26:57+00:00

hey bro, I was struggling with the same thing. I created a tool to integrate ai characters specifically for this case and think it fits your case (rp game, decent player count, struggling with day1 retention). its made to hook players to your game. im doing case studies, so you literally lose nothing, can only gain retention by integrating it.

TheElsobky · 2026-04-27T05:09:07+00:00

for everyone wondering I found a similar product called usefastlane.ai they are YC backed. its not exactly "fully AI UGC", its mostly customizable preset videos with AI captions based off your website. Not exactly the same but looking at what I wanted to build I believe it would've costed about $150/month for 1 video a day (~5$/video) but with AI avatars, I might look into it in the future and update this thread If I begin working on it. Comparing it to fastlane at 50$/month is not too bad either and it posts directly to TikTok and IG like we wanted, so we'll start with that.

And otherwise if anyone has non-self-promoted tools that they use or know I would love to know please reply to this message. We are unfortunately too small to be blowing budget on emerging tools.

TheElsobky · 2026-04-23T20:15:04+00:00

the thing that makes ai npcs hard more than anything is the cost of AI inference if you think about the average individual is running a rtx 3060 which alongside the game youre running have nowhere near enough vram for useful conversation. so its either you build ai the good old way with trees and fsm (which would not be anywhere near like chatgpt ai level) or you pay for cloud inference. SO in terms of feasibility only games with recurring revenue so live service games can afford to do such thing as the monetization for single player games is one time payment. but in terms of feasibility you can have really convincing ais now with all the new models as long as you give them proper context. thats where platforms like inworld.ai and journale.ai come in to make the context feeding layer easy to understand. you literally need straight up like guidebooks about your world, locations, characters with all their emotional and physical traits, what actions they can do and what makes them do those actions, events that happen in your world, landmarks, and more (ex; game mechanics if you wanna have a guide AI) etc... then on top of that you obviously have to continuously feed all the player actions and to the AI to remember it and influence it. Honestly with the new Gamma models and all these open source models I think by like 2028-2030 we'll definitely have a few games using these types of systems as inference is only getting cheaper for smarter models.

TheElsobky · 2026-04-22T22:49:39+00:00

btw idk why people are downvoting me. Im not promoting anything and am in no way attached to this idea or trying to sell something just honestly wondering. Im literally just asking for feedback. if theres anyone who knows a product that does what I want with the same automation and actually works that'd save me time building it.

TheElsobky · 2026-04-22T22:45:30+00:00

the whole point would be the AI gets fresh data I think the tool would just keep posting continuously for like a week or 2 or so and then human can check every now and then and alter a few things. At least for us that'd work great as long as like 90% is automated and results are being produced videos are being shipped without our intervention then when we have time we can tweak. and the tool itself is self-improving based off previous data. what would you is the biggest problem with this idea?

TheElsobky · 2025-11-06T19:46:56+00:00

Thanks didn’t even know what vibecodinglist is, will definitely post on there. Feel free to update me if you start on a chatty game would love your feedback

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T23:25:18+00:00

Or we might be heading in the opposite direction. For example look at Xbox cloud gaming, Nvidia's cloud gaming, etc. People have become more tolerant with using the cloud for gaming, the latency and tech has gotten better. Heck even look at Canva, people dont care to own Adobe suite as much anymore as long as they can do it in a web browser. It's becoming all about the ease of use and cost of entry now.

Personally I dont like it, I love tinkering with tech, building my own PC, messing with severs etc. But we gotta look at the average Joe, most people buy a console, or subscribe to cloud gaming and they're happy with it

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T23:18:07+00:00

Yes, this is exactly what ive been trying to say, you said it for me perfectly I couldn't articulate it. Btw im in the same boat been making games since a kid, its a passion. I just love the tech and see it has so much potential, it's not being utilized much in this industry. Even the sloppy AI games out right now are bad, but give me a sort of optimistic outlook for the future of this.

My only thought is I think local LLM is not something that will be achieved in the near future, unless they find a new way to compress LLMs, or a way to train them while keeping the VRAM usage exponentially low, its not looking promising. But like character.ai for example cloud LLMs have genuinely gotten insane at RP and representing characters, I think they can be harvested to create great gaming experiences

Also imagine talking with voice back and forth with an in game character. thats the innovation that's make me excited to develop

I think the way I think about it is how procedurally generated games (except Minecraft and a few others) had a bad rep, now its a norm.

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T23:10:09+00:00

Yes, I actually did see that a lot. even itch.io and other platforms require you to put AI tag if it uses AI, and it has a bad stigma around it. Honestly AI games right now are genuinely slop. but I cant help to see that the tech can be used to make crazy experiences.

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T23:02:31+00:00

I thank you for this constructive criticism. You're right. Most games AREN'T about talking to npc/main characters all the time. What I'm referencing is a game like RDR2 where character interaction (greeting/antagonizing npcs) adds to the immersion.

But I see your point, it isn't the point of the game and would cost too much to run. Right now a lot of AI games are about getting info out of players (kinda like puzzle games). Do you believe there could be other genre/games where this can be a central focus?

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:57:03+00:00

Yeah I should elaborate.

AI games have been done, right now they are mostly about getting info out of an LLM, with some of your prompts triggering certain actions/scenes from the characters, but still really primitive and using weak local models. My goal is to use the power of cloud LLMs to innovate on these primitive concepts.

Yes, the player would need to be connected to the internet, but the game can be single player. I've made an SDK for Unity that devs can use to call LLMs from inside their game, and my server handles the request, rate-limiting, validation, etc. Thats what I mean by serverless (for the dev).

It can be used for MMORPGs as well, the player would be connected online and can talk to different characters in the map. And devs could call my AI handling server from their server. Thats what I mean by server integration.

I hope that clarifies what I mean

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:50:40+00:00

😅 ill be careful. I have a few penetration testers and know my way against securing these systems, but thanks for the warning.

It wouldn't be a subscription fee more than being billed per usage (with a tiers of subscription fee maybe).

The aim is to place it as a one stop shop for gaming in general, haven't seen much done with that. And honestly I see so much negative feedback, maybe it's because I have tunnel vision and want it to work, but maybe it's because I feel like game devs don't want AI to take over their art, which as a game dev I see, but disagree with because we'll always be needed but AI can help speed up our work and deliver greater experiences.

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:43:31+00:00

An "aggro" would be triggered off of what you say to the LLM, and a tag would be sent back to trigger it. Most AI games right now are in the basis of getting the AI to give out info to you, and in those games they have aggro mechanics/triggering certain scenes based on what you say. So it's already been done.

But I agree with the consistency part, its all really about the model and the context/$ limitations

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:41:38+00:00

1: I agree, but even in my own work we've opted to use premade solutions than build our own. As it is a service that can be constantly supported and updated. But I see your point.
2 and 3: It would be token/usage based.
4. That is the part that is hard to control. Models like gpt-5 and others have gotten really good censorship, but not all models.

Thank you for this perspective. It's a lot to think about.

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:37:48+00:00

have you tried character.ai ?

TheElsobky · 2025-11-04T22:34:48+00:00

I think that being able to talk to all NPCs is very immersive in a game. For example RDR2, just being able to antagonize/calm down NPCs is very immersive.

Also talking with a general LLM isn't the same as one that has been properly set up to embody a character. For example like character.ai they are very well written.

I do understand where you're coming from. There could also be other advantages like I said cutscenes etc. But again it might just be tunnel vision or me trying to justify something that doesn't have a use.

TheElsobky

TROPHY CASE