Hello everyone,
This is the first time I post on Medium, so I guess that I should first introduce myself. I am a young computer science student, currently on my third year. As part of my course, I must create an innovative project with other students, based on our interests. We are a team composed of seven students, all interested by video games and artificial intelligence. Nowadays, dialogs in video games are handwritten, and in our opinion, this harms the immersion, especially in narrative video games like RPGs. When you talk with an NPC (Non Playable Character), you often hear the same dialogs, again and again. Conversations are limited by the choices provided by the developers, and it’s not always a satisfying option. To overcome this problem, we came up with an idea :
Our project is named J.U.D.A.S (Juste Un Délicieux Agrément Scénaristique in French), and it consists in making a solution to generate at runtime video games dialogs, thanks to artificial intelligence. Yes, I know, put it like that, it seems funny nor maybe stupid. Why big editors like Rockstar or Ubisoft haven’t already developed this kind of tool, if this is so easy or interesting ? In fact, Ubisoft at least have already begun working on this, since we know that fifteen percent of the last DLC of Assassin’s Creed Odyssey’s dialogs are generated by an AI of their own. Indeed, this is a little bit different, because dialogs are still not generated at run time. However, thanks to the latest progress in matter of technology, we can assume that dialogs will (finally!) evolve in the next generations of video games. Some projects had already been realized, but there are more experiences than commercial ideas.
Moreover, we realized a survey in order to check if our idea interested players or not. Sixty-height percent of the answers find that current video games dialogs could be improved, and ninety-five percent would like a game with a free dialog system, where the player could tell what he wants and NPCs would answer contextually. Now we know than players and, apparently, developers are interested, we can expose our primitive conception of the project. I would like to point out that this it is still in progress, so it can still change.
Our idea is to make an API to assist developers and existing architectures to implement natural dialogs in video games. This API should be configurable, in order to give each character a personality, a history and maybe a vocabulary of his own. The player could tell what he wants, and each NPC may answer thanks to an AI. With this system, developer could mix current dialog system for handwritten characters and the new one to offer to the player the possibility to talk freely most of the time. Of course, it’s a wide and ambitious project, which should be built step by step. The first objective is to create something functional by unifying current AI technologies like IBM Watson, Cortana and so on. Later, we could replace these tools by our own.
We have three years to provide a result, and we know this is a short amount of time for this project, especially since we are only seven. Nevertheless, we believe that we can achieve an interesting work, and maybe provide a new tool to developers. We are interested in any advice on this project, so don’t hesitate to comment on this story! By the way, feel free to share this article. We would really appreciate if you liked this article or found some interest by reading it. Thanks a lot for reading, and have a nice day.
Axel, member of the J.U.D.A.S project.
