Popular AI Dungeon Rise Through Collaborative Strength

When talking about interactive fiction games, by far the most popular currently is AI Dungeon. It is a free to play text adventure game created by Latitude, Inc. and released in December 2019 for both PC and mobile platforms. In order to generate the stories, AI Dungeon uses artificial intelligence. Specifically speaking, AI Dungeon makes use of OpenAI’s text prediction model that is probably one of the best when it comes to fabricating the next words in a sentence.

In March 2019, software developer Nick Walton entered AI Dungeon into a hackathon. The objective of hackathons are to not only assemble programmers, developers, and other people that are engaged in software designing, but also to generate a working program. AI Dungeon was a smash in the hackathon that Nick Walton joined in. Some online gamers also played AI Dungeon.

AI Dungeon was also described as Walton’s passion project where he was able to establish his own company Latitude, Inc. Like a lot of passion projects and indie games, AI Dungeon rose to the ranks largely through community efforts. With this, Latitude has continued to keep the free to play model of AI Dungeon because of consistent community backing through Patreon crowd funding, donations, voluntary developer work, and other open source projects.

In the first launch of the game, there were at least 2,000 individuals who played AI Dungeon. When it was relaunched in December 2019, now donning its shiny GPT-2 model, the success of the game was palpable. Two weeks after its re-release, the game had been reaching a high point of 700 players at any given time. Furthermore, 100,000 were estimated to have played the game eventually and they generated at least 500,000 stories. Six weeks later, AI Dungeon had surpassed the millionth mark with 6,000,000 distinct stories told. The support for AI Dungeon is also evident from the donations on Patreon which amounts to $15,000 a month.

In the world of interactive fiction games, there is a very important factor that makes AI Dungeon distinctive. Due to the technological handicaps beforehand, the production of stories on interactive fiction games are already set. These preset versions of interactive fiction games have unchanging content and could possibly be dull over time. AI Dungeon operates on the GPT-2 model from OpenAI which is developed with 1.5 billion parameters based on 8 million web pages. The practically never ending variation in datasets result in the natural creation of narratives which are permissible in many kinds of platforms. Owing to GPT-2’s excellent text generation abilities, AI Dungeon has become a truly open world with the player’s imagination as its only hindrance.

AI Dungeon is a creative gamer’s pipe dream. Also, because of its ability to create stories boundlessly, the narratives are very distinct. AI Dungeon also has more than seven backgrounds that gamers can opt from, namely: fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, zombies, cyberpunk, custom, and other archived models. Every one of these characteristics are what makes AI Dungeon fully immersing for its players despite its lack of graphic depiction or sound direction.