The video game industry is increasingly demanding games with more environments, more non-player characters (NPCs), and more gameplay mechanics. There are now artificial intelligence tools to help development teams meet these challenges, capable of automatically generating text, voice, and even animations for NPCs. But how do they actually work? Oriane Piedevache–Opsomer, co-founder of X&Immersion, explains:
The dialogue and descriptions of the fictional world and its characters, as well as general information about the game, are used to train the AI model.
Text Automation
Let's look at an example of a dialogue text generator. These tools can provide diverse content and a more personalized game experience. For example, let's say you arrive in a village and enter a tavern. If you are level 1 and have no money, the innkeeper will tell you to leave, but if you are level 20 and a recognized squire, he might be happy to welcome you and offer you a drink. How does it work? We train an AI model using dialogue and descriptions about our fictional world and its characters, as well as general information about the game. Using this model, we can generate dialogue for our characters, which is consistent with their world, their personalities, and their emotions. The result is diverse content that allows players to influence the behavior of NPCs.
Speech synthesis
You can even have the innkeeper speak, using all the possibilities of AI dialogue with speech synthesis technology, which allows you to generate artificial voices for your NPCs. How does it work? You act out the dialogue as if someone was in a theatre, and then use the recording to teach the model the intonation and other characteristics of the character's voice.
Auto Animation
Now, let's talk about animation. Animation is very important for the believability of the dialogue because it shows how the dialogue affects the NPC. Depending on what you say to him, the innkeeper's facial expression can go from very happy to furious. Traditionally, all this work was done by animators who would repeat the same work for every NPC, which was very time-consuming and tedious. Luckily, there are now tools that automate some of this work. Using speech or text, mouth movements and facial expressions can be generated automatically, allowing animators to work much faster when producing a game.
