Today unveils Dreamia AI-powered character storytelling engine
AI-powered character engine: Dreaming, a real-time storytelling character engine driven by AI, was launched Today. Lisbon, Portugal-based We’re developing a cutting-edge, intimate social simulation game where users create vibrant virtual islands. Its most significant product launch to date is Dreamia.
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Today secured $5 million from Sfermion and Big Brain earlier this year to realize its vision of a more dynamic, responsive, and creative snug social sim. With former leaders from Nintendo, SEGA, Epic Games, and Unity, the team has a long history in the gaming industry.
Today’s next-generation character engine is called Dreaming. It makes intelligent, interactive, hyper-realistic, and dynamically responding NPCs using AI. Today, every interaction is seamless, enjoyable, and intensely personal because players’ actions build the tale as they play. The business claimed that because no two players have precisely the same experience, the game’s authenticity, complexity, and stickiness are enhanced.
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According to co-founder Michael O’Connor, no custom engine still incorporates cinematic narrative elements, such as character arcs, story structure, subtext, and intricate interrelationships, into a game despite the growing popularity of AI companions and chatbots.
“Dreamia was created internally,” O’Connor remarked. We are genuinely creating the next wave of video games. Dreamia’s unique approach is its story-first methodology, which incorporates real-life dynamics into non-player characters (NPCs) to give them emotional nuance, contextual awareness, and response.
He claimed that Dreamia increases player ownership and influence over the results of games and makes them more enjoyable. According to O’Connor, players take on an active role in creating their own stories and imaginatively enhancing their encounters.
Today’s team of AI engineers and data scientists with PhDs optimizes open-source LLMs to improve their functionality, especially for Dreamia. The method maintains high-quality text and speech creation while increasing performance and reducing server costs with a hybrid strategy that uses local and cloud-based LLMs.
Dreamia’s non-player characters will have these features:
Deep personalities: Dreamia’s advanced artificial intelligence (AI) drives realistic actions and interactions in its non-playable characters. The ability of these NPCs to hold intelligent conversations and to comprehend and adjust to player actions instantly makes for a dynamic and captivating gaming experience.
Contextual awareness: Dreamia NPCs, in contrast to standard NPCs, are aware of changes in their surroundings and respond appropriately to novel circumstances. NPCs provide pertinent and contextual responses to a more realistic and immersive experience.
Sustained memory: Every player’s action turns into a particular Dreamia map. Dreamia recalls previous exchanges and responds to current actions in TODAY, allowing each participant to create their universe within the platform. As a result, interactions feel significant and cumulative over time, creating a continuous evolutionary narrative experience.
Emotional intelligence: Dreamia-enabled NPCs can recognize players’ emotional states and react appropriately and sympathetically. As a result, interactions within the game feel more natural and poignant.
Procedural animation: Dreamia triggers animations in real-time based on emotional data in the conversation. Because of the dynamic and contextual bodily reactions that result, encounters feel more natural, thanks to expressive facial expressions and body language.
Dreaming, which serves as Today’s narrative core, generates the emotional energy that gives the world humanity. According to the business, Dreamia also allows users to quickly become fully engaged in an emotionally vivid virtual environment they may share with others. Ben Cleary, the creative director and writer who won an Oscar, stated that he recognizes the importance of storytelling to people.
I’ve been creating complex storylines and immersive worlds since I was a child when I used to draw side scrollers and stories on my bedroom walls. According to Cleary, my love of storytelling as a holistic experience that blends images, interactivity, and emotional depth was formed by my early affinity for video games, novels, and movies. I’ve discovered that compelling storytelling involves more than just narrating a narrative; it also entails touching a nerve that genuinely affects the listener and leaves them feeling moved. These narrative principles are essential differentiators to successfully deliver interactive storytelling at scale as games increasingly resemble movies.
Later this year, Dreamia will allow users to build their characters using a visual front-end that can be accessed online and in-game. This will benefit players, developers, and other stakeholders. This will add to Today’s procedural creative tool, which uses a proprietary LLM to evaluate and translate inputs to create dynamic architectural and interior design concepts. Players then have direct authority and ownership over these creations through an in-game module that allows them to modify them.
Today launches in alpha early next year, with the next major playtest scheduled for mid-summer
With 39 staff, the company has raised $5 million so far. While alternative NPC solutions are available, Today Todayted shows that NPC interactions in a game are not well-integrated when third-party APIs are tacked on. An internal AI system that directly affects global gameplay opens up many possibilities.
“Dreamia was developed out of necessity as we build Today,” added O’Connor of Today. We developed it internally to give a more sophisticated and responsive experience than third-party alternatives since it is something that our game requires. A single line of code can change a character’s context, such as informing them about a new building. By contrast, most current methods demand the definition of a building event, followed by a delay while the character is made aware of it. Dreamia’s reduced workflow makes it far more responsive and efficient, accelerating game creation and improving the player experience simultaneously.
“For example, in our game, Residents have different needs that players must attend to,” he continued. Gamers talk to residents to find out how they can help by assisting them in choosing their outfits. The NPCs notice when a player changes a resident’s attire and respond with remarks and viewpoints. They might have a favorite pair of sneakers, pick one outfit over another, or prefer specific hues, designs, etc. Players can actively change their environment thanks to this degree of situational and contextual awareness, giving the NPCs a more realistic and exciting feel.
He stated, “NPCs are no more passive chatbots, but rather active players in the game world thanks to Dreamamia’s superior contextual awareness characteristics. Their ability to express their preferences, adjust to circumstances, and offer feedback makes their interactions more enjoyable and meaningful. Since NPCs are essential to the player’s experience and not merely a part of the game environment, this strengthens the bond between players and NPC residents and distinguishes Dreamia from rivals.
A new generation of narrative experiences is powered by Dreamia, which also drives new player-NPC relationships. Neo-NPC solutions currently in use are frequently rigid, flimsy, and unyielding. The rest of the NPC’s cognitive capacities, such as emotional reasoning, social responsiveness, long-term memory, and spatial awareness, are more challenging to transfer from the flexible nature of human conversation. NPCs are supposed to know about the game, the player, and Dreamia itself.
The NPCs will adapt dynamically to changes in their game’s environment, reacting appropriately to player actions and environmental factors. This creates a believable game world where NPC dialogues and behaviors consistently reflect the game’s state, creating a more immersive, interactive, and fun gaming experience.
