Alice Chambers |
Xbox and Inworld AI have partnered to develop artificial intelligence-powered tools for game creators.
As part of the multi-year partnership, the firms will develop an AI design copilot to assist game designers with creative ideas, turning prompts into detailed scripts, dialogue trees, quests and more. They will also build an AI character runtime engine that can be integrated into games to enable new narratives with stories, quests and dialogue for players to experience.
“As with all creators tools we make at Xbox, our goal is to deliver state-of-the-art AI tools for game developers of any size, anywhere in the world and on every platform where players want to play,” said Haiyan Zhang, general manager of Gaming AI at Xbox. “We want to help make it easier for developers to realise their visions, try new things, push the boundaries of gaming today and experiment to improve gameplay, player connection and more. We will collaborate and innovate with game creators inside Xbox studios as well as third-party studios as we develop the tools that meet their needs and inspire new possibilities for future games.”
Inworld, an M12-portfolio company, will provide expertise in generative AI models for character development. This, mixed with Microsoft’s cloud-based AI solutions including Azure OpenAI Service, will help the firms to improve the overall gaming experience.
“Inworld’s goal is to bring life to characters and virtual worlds in a way that was previously unimaginable – shifting from a scripted player-character dynamic to one that adapts to players’ actions and choices in real-time and providing players with a sense of agency and engagement like never before,” said Ilya Gelfebeyn, CEO at Inworld AI. “Orchestrating multiple AI models at runtime allows our character engine to power character expressions, gestures, dialogue, and actions that are dynamic and responsive.
“Expanding the capabilities of the character engine will be a core focus of the collaboration, with a dual emphasis on expanding both the engine’s AI modalities and optimising it for performance at runtime. While we’re focused on bringing depth and realism to characters (and rendering them within the logic and fantasy of their worlds), what we’re most excited about is how developers will use this breakthrough technology in ways that we have yet to imagine.”