What started as Nick Walton’s college hackathon project grew into AI Dungeon, a popular text adventure game with over 1.5 million users.
Walton is the co-founder and CEO of Latitude, a Utah-based startup that uses AI to create unique gaming storylines.
He spoke with NVIDIA AI Podcast host Noah Kravitz about how natural language processing methods can generate infinite open-ended adventure plots for interactive games like AI Dungeon, which draws an average of 150,000 new players each month.
Key Points From This Episode:
- In AI Dungeon, players type in their actions or responses to prompts — for example, “You’re about to enter a world of endless possibilities, where you can do absolutely anything you can imagine … Will you proceed?” — and AI keeps the story going.
- Unlike other text adventure games that use pre-written content, AI Dungeon offers infinite unique possibilities for each storyline, as the AI adapts and responds to almost any user input.
- Users can dive into adventures individually or in multiplayer mode, which allows players with distinct characters to take turns interacting with the AI within the same game session. To kick off the story, they can choose from a list of initial prompts or create custom adventures.
Tweetables:
“There’s something really compelling here in this ability to have stories that can go anywhere.” — Nick Walton [3:30]
In gaming and in the world, AI enables “new experiences that are no longer static and predetermined, but dynamic and alive.” — Nick Walton [7:16]
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