We’ve been working on some cool character tech since late 2022. We started development about a month before the debut of chatGPT.
The release of ChatGPT ushered in a wave of developers and startups focusing on chatbot NPCs. While this new capability was intriguing, we decided to stay the course with our focus on AI characters designed to participate in core gameplay in mainstream PC and console games.
Our characters are aware of their surroundings, interact with props and furniture, execute interruptible multi-step plans. They do converse as well, of course. Players can strike up a conversation with our characters at any time. But our dialogue content is authored by designers (with optional AI assistance), rather than generated on the fly, ensuring meaningful, grounded interactions.
For some applications, like XR, open-ended chat based dialogue could be beneficial, for example enabling hands-free voice input. It is possible to layer in this mode of interaction, integrated with our behavioral engine.
We started showing a demo of our characters to studios at GDC 2024, behind closed doors. We’d like to start sharing quick peeks at what we’re building more publicly in short video clips. To get started, here is a brief look at a bartender in a western saloon that we created in March for GDC, running with the Bitpart Unity SDK.
I’ve written a bit more about our bartender on Substack. If you’d like to explore Bitpart for your own project(s), we are signing people up for our Tech Preview. Links to both in the comments below.