Latitude Studio has attracted $3.3 million in investments thanks to the success of its AI Dungeon text sandbox. All the plots in the game are generated by artificial intelligence, and its creator is confident that the development of this technology will help reduce the budgets of the development of AAA titles by hundreds of times.The main investor of Latitude was the venture fund NFX.
His partner James Currier calls the studio “a leading company in the field of AI” and is confident that in the future it will create revolutionary projects.
Briefly about the gameAI Dungeon was originally created as a project for a hackathon, but did not receive any awards at the competition.
Despite this, its creator Nick Walton decided to continue development.
The first version of the game was released in 2019. Now it works on the basis of the GPT-3 algorithm and is available on PC, in the web version and on iOS and Android mobile platforms. At the moment, the MAU AI Dungeon is 1.5 million people.
Difference from classic text gamesAI Dungeon does not use stories written in advance by developers that players can interact with, but each time generates unique stories with the help of artificial intelligence.
Users have three ways to interact with the game: perform an action (go somewhere, watch, shoot, etc.), say something during the dialogue and write something for the development of the story itself.
At the same time, any actions within these teams are limited only by the imagination of the players themselves. Artificial intelligence reacts to whole sentences, as well as to individual phrases and even words that it uses to further develop the plot.
AI Dungeon is also not limited by genres and scale of stories. The community regularly experiments with plots and settings, thereby contributing to the further training of AI. For example, just yesterday one of the users published a generated sketch in the style of “Monty Python”.
AI Dungeon Prospects”With this technology, you can create a world with tens of thousands of characters, each of whom will have their own dreams and needs.
This will make game worlds more dynamic and lively — as opposed to games like World of Warcraft, where 10 million people perform the same quest,“ says Walton.
Despite the loud statements, Latitude Studios are still far from achieving such ambitions. AI Dungeon, although it generates an infinite number of stories, is just a text sandbox without graphics.
Walton is still convinced that in the future, trained AI will be used in the development of AAA games and will reduce their development “from more than $100 million to $100 thousand.”
However, investors believe in Latitude, and the studio will spend the funds raised on developing its gaming platform and hiring new artificial intelligence specialists.