AI Dungeon’s Creators are Launching an Experimental AI-Powered Game

Latitude, the startup behind text game AI Dungeon’s, is expanding into a new artificial intelligence-powered game platform called Voyage. The company announced the closed beta on Friday, opening a waitlist for current AI Dungeon’s users. It is the next step for a company that began with a university hackathon project, but that ultimately hopes to help other people create their own games using trained AI models.

AI Dungeon’s, which launched as 2 in 2019, is powered by OpenAI’s GPT-2 and GPT-3 text generation algorithms. To start, you generate some introductory text or write your own adventure setup. Then you can enter any command you want and a Dungeons & Dragons-style virtual game master will improvise some text describing the outcome.

Voyage features more structured games. There’s a Reigns-inspired experiment called Medieval Problems, where you’re the ruler of a kingdom and enter freeform text commands for your advisors, then see the outcome reflected in success ratings. It’s still a lot like AI Dungeon’s, but with a clearer framing for what they are supposed to do and a system for evaluating success after playing with the game, that system seems pretty forgiving and more than a bit random.

Latitude CEO Nick Walton said that Voyage is a natural evolution for Latitude. AI games start at the beginning— with text adventures reminiscent of Zork or Colossal Cave Adventure for the company. They are moving into 2D images where you’ve got some level of visuals in. AI Dungeon’s, which is included in Voyage, recently added AI-produced pictures created with the Pixray image generator.