The use of generative AI in video game development is highly controversial. Players keep saying they don’t want it, yet the use of AI continues to grow rapidly. But does it have to be slanted?
This week at South by Southwest (SXSW), Brazilian studio ARVORE unveiled a game that sees the show saying “handmade” and “AI-generated” aren’t necessarily contradictory terms.
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Fabula Rasa is a fantasy VR interactive experience where players are trapped in a cage in the center of a medieval town. The story unfolds through real-time conversations with AI-powered characters. Depending on the player’s discussion, the characters decide whether to save them or throw them into the monster pit.
In the making-of video above, ARVORE’s Luiza Justus and Marcelo Marcati say they approached the game as artists not to save time or money, but to see if AI could be a “creative medium or stage partner.” The game’s art and sounds are handmade. AI was only used to give the characters brains.
The challenge, they say, was connecting generative AI models with traditional game logic. They created prompts for the AI to control each character’s personality, emotions, and speech while the game engine handled movement and world perception. Real-time updates feed into the AI so your character knows what’s going on in the world around you, the AI processes how your character feels about it, and sends messages back to the engine as continuous feedback.
Marcelo, the game’s director, said Fabula Rasa started out as an experiment, but ended up challenging the team’s design abilities while also helping them understand the nature of play.
The landscape of Fabur a Rasa is stage-like, and the characters look like dolls. ARVORE says this is intentional to remind players that the game is a performance.
Fabula Rasa is only a demo for now, but ARVORE wants to expand on it. This project demonstrates the potential of the type of technology that Nvidia has demonstrated with the ACE AI game character.
The reaction to Sony’s AI-generated Aloy has raised questions about how such innovations will be received, but ARVORE aims to show that this is one area where generative AI can play a role in creating interesting new experiences, whether considered games or something else.
Following SXSW, there will be a demo at FilmGate Interactive from Wednesday, March 18th to Sunday, March 21st. More information can be found on the studio’s website.
