We're back, baby!

After a few months of hiatus, Heroes development is back on track! This time, moving faster than it ever has before.

As some of you know, we paused Heroes development for a few months so that we could finish Drop #3 of the AI Renaissance. This included introducing the new Memory System for AI Dungeon, one of the biggest improvements to the core gameplay we've made in years.

We felt that it would be a significant enough improvement for AI Dungeon players that it was worth pausing Heroes for a short time to get it out the door. However, now that it's finished, we're going to be shifting more and more of our attention to pushing Heroes forward and getting it ready for early access.

And now, Heroes’ development is screaming forward. Where before Heroes was a solo effort by me, we're now adding more team members to the Heroes team to accelerate development.

We've already added several new major improvements to the experience in just the past couple of weeks. Our next major version of Heroes will likely be the biggest update we've ever made to the experience. Here are several of the improvements (though there are many more) we are working on as part of this update:

NPC Action Generator

One of the issues we ran into before was NPCs either taking too few actions or taking unnecessary, weird actions that didn't fit with the story. To fix that, we implemented a new system that actually simulates what actions NPCs might take before the story generator writes what happens. This gives us much more control over NPC behavior, preventing weird actions while allowing characters to take actions completely unrelated to the player. Now, only nearby NPCs will take actions, and these actions are more interesting and contextually appropriate than before.

For example, yesterday, I played a game where a man entered the tavern complaining about bandits chasing him. I sent a village boy to fetch the guards, who then entered the tavern and interrogated the man. After a few actions, the NPC action generator decided that the guards had finished and would leave. The AI narrated them leaving the tavern to search for the bandits without me doing anything to prompt them. This created a much stronger feeling that I was in a world with characters taking actions independent of me, making it feel much more alive.

Tier System

We've introduced a comprehensive tier system that affects players, NPCs, and items. Characters now have levels and class tiers, with health, damage, and healing all scaling accordingly. In the past, there wasn't a significant difference between the stats of different NPCs, sometimes making it far too easy to defeat powerful NPCs. Now, very strong NPCs can have significantly higher stats based on their tier.

Combined with the NPC action generation system, it's made combat significantly more interesting.

For example, I recently played a game where I tried to kill the queen of Larion and take over her kingdom at level 1. I completed a quest for the local guard captain to win an audience and got into her throne room.

I tried to jump up to her dais and hold her hostage with a dagger to her throat. Unfortunately, she was a high-tier NPC. She immediately cast a magical barrier to protect herself while her high-level griffin companion slashed me, taking off 30% of my HP right off the bat. With her four guards joining in, I was completely wrecked within three turns 😅.

But I actually loved this! Part of the goal of Heroes is to make an AI Dungeon with meaningful, realistic challenges. If I'm able to defeat the queen at level 1, then progressing has no meaning and isn't fun. Now, I'll have to get much stronger before I can exact my revenge on her 😈.

Item System

We've also completely overhauled our item system. Items now have tiers, levels, types, and categories defined in the world config. You can now explicitly equip items in equipment slots, making it clear what you're wearing and what items you're using.

This sets us up for another overhaul we're still working on, enabling items to give you bonuses to your armor, damage, skills, and attributes, or even special abilities for unique items. This will make the collection and progression of items a much more meaningful and fun system.

To further enhance the “fight, loot, get stronger” loop, we've also implemented a looting system where you can easily loot defeated enemies and get tier-appropriate items as rewards.

Dynamic Music System

One thing I've found myself doing while playing Heroes is turning on background music depending on the mood. It improved my experience so much that I wanted a system like that built into Heroes. So, we've created a new dynamic music system that auto-detects the mood of the current story and plays music to match it. If the story is peaceful, you'll hear calming tunes; when combat starts, the music will shift to match the intensity. We're still tuning how this system works, but I think it will significantly add to the immersion of the game.

UI Improvements

We've made a TON of improvements to the user interface as well. A few bigger changes include:

• A new character slots screen for managing your heroes

• Enhanced inventory management with improved search and filtering

• More intuitive character and achievement displays

• Mobile-friendly updates to make Heroes playable on a wider range of devices

There's much more to come!

This is a huge number of changes, but we're just getting started. We have several other massive improvements to the engine planned in the next few weeks, and we expect Heroes to become a dramatically different experience very quickly.

More and more, I believe Heroes is going to deliver an experience unlike anything that has ever existed before: an immersive game world with true freedom, where you can be whoever you want to be, choose whatever you want to choose, and shape the world in any way you can imagine.

I can't wait to get it to the point where you can all play it. Until then, we'll be hard at work making it the best version of itself it can be.

Heroes Dev Log #14: We’re Back and Better Than Ever! (latitude.io)

Are there any news regarding ai dungeon heroes? Is heroes still in development?

Does somebody or you have more information?

Heroes Dev Log #13: To True Choice in Games (latitude.io)

Player Choice

Two of our core design pillars for Heroes are that players should have true choice, and that their choices should actually matter.

In the vast majority of story-based games, this isn’t true, or is only true in a very limited way.

Even in the games that are best at doing this (Fallout New Vegas, or BG3, for example), choice is still quite restricted. They do the best they can with limited technology, but the result is that you only ever have a limited number of options. And very few of your choices actually change the outcome of the world in a significant way.

I remember playing Fallout New Vegas for the first time, and I loved how nuanced and varied the options you had for finishing the game were. You could side with multiple different factions, or none at all, choosing to take control yourself.

You had, if not true choices, at least interesting choices. But at the end of the day, you weren’t able to see the effects of those choices. You couldn’t explore a New Vegas where the NCR had won, or where the Legion had taken control, or experience the consequences of your decisions.

And I don’t blame the studios. The work to enable that kind of experience would have been immense. They would have needed to create 2-4X as much content, to show the impact of just 4 different choices, a herculean task.

But for the first time, I think we can finally build games that don’t have those limitations. We can make worlds where you can shape them in significant ways, changing the future for characters, towns, or entire kingdoms and then actually see and experience those results.

So how do we do that? We’ve built several new AI systems for Heroes that enable that vision.

AI Memory

Memory is one of the critical systems we’ve built to ensure that players’ choices really do matter. Without great AI memory choices are quickly forgotten, losing all consequence and meaning.

I’ve previously written in depth about the memory system we built to make player choices matter and why that’s so important. I’ve heard from a ton of players that these posts really resonated with them, so I definitely recommend reading them if you haven’t.

Realistic Constraints

I’ve also written about why constraints are important and actually help to create better stories. However, constraints need to be realistic; that is, they need to fit the rules of the world, rather than be arbitrary walls. If they stop the player, they should be unscalable mountains rather than invisible barriers.

We’ve come to accept far more of these invisible walls at the status quo than we realize. We often forget how arbitrary so many of the limitations that most game systems impose on us are. In most games the majority of items we can never interact with, buildings are indestructible, we only have a few dialog options, and we can only follow the predefined quest paths outlined for us.

Soon we won’t have to. This is one of the areas I think we’ve refined the Heroes Engine to work remarkably well. There are obviously still a few kinks here and there, but in general, the system is extremely good at letting you do anything that should be possible in the rules of the world, while disallowing things that wouldn’t.

Plot Arcs, Triggers, and Effects

One of the challenges we’ve faced in development and testing with giving so much player choice is how do we guide players on completing plot arcs that leave them emotionally satisfied?

With movies or books there is no consumer choice, so you can define exactly the plot you want. With games, all you have to do is restrict the player’s choice or slightly modify the arc based on a few player decisions. That lets you define one or a few plot arcs based on some limited choices.

But we want not just a few possible routes through an experience, but infinite, based on the infinite creativity that players can express through their actions.

We’ve tried several different systems to enable this, with plot outlines or AI planning, but they never quite captured what we wanted. So instead we built a new system not seen in AI Dungeon or in any AI consumer experience we know of. We call this system AI Triggers.

Inspired by map editor tools in games like Age of Empires and StarCraft, AI triggers work similarly to triggers in those experiences, where you define an if-condition and a then-consequence. But for AI triggers, you’re not just doing simple programmatic actions, but are instead doing fuzzy story-based conditions and effects, leveraging AI to detect triggers and cause broad effects.

With these triggers, creators can then chain together plot arcs in a way that respects player choice, but sets up consequences that will lead to epic climaxes and meaningful payoffs.

For example, a simple arc might involve the following triggers:

• IF: the player enters the town of Murdock. THEN: Zaire the cleric tells them about a necromancer that has been growing power in the east.

• IF: The player goes to the necromancer’s castle. THEN: they discover the necromancer has made an undead monstrosity composed of several different animals.

• IF: They defeat the necromancer and his monstrosity. THEN: they find out the necromancer was just the pawn of an evil warlord that’s planning to invade the kingdom.

• Etc… etc…

This is a small example of how creators could then create epic arcs for players to engage with. But critically they don’t define in any way what the player WILL do. Only what might happen if they make certain choices. They could choose to fight the necromancer, or to ally with him, or to ignore the plot line altogether.

This enables true choice while still enabling creators to craft compelling narratives and stories.

It takes a fair bit of fancy AI work to enable unlimited numbers of triggers at scale, but what I love is that it’s also a general-purpose system that can be used to do any number of things (many of which I probably have never imagined). Creators might use triggers to make Easter eggs, dimensional portals, epic word events, unique abilities, or interesting magical artifacts.

Leaving a Legacy

Finally, there’s a whole new level of choice and effect that we believe we can build with AI that has never been possible before.

The systems we’ve built with Heroes are a foundation that will enable the consequences of your choices to persist not just across a single adventure, but across new characters living in the same world

Many games have new game-plus mechanics, where you can restart as a new character, keeping some advantages or skills. But imagine starting a new character and having it carry over not just a few items or skills, but also the entire legacy and consequences of everything that happened in your previous adventure.

For example, you might play as an orphan who once saw the great hero (your previous character) far off in the distance, and who now lives in the world he left behind. You could visit the towns he saved or founded, meet the companions he journeyed with, and deal with the ramifications of the choices he made, seeing in broad detail all the consequences of your decisions, with true power to change the world.

And you could do that again and again and again, shaping the world you play in, over generations of characters, all with their own stories and adventures.

This is one of the possibilities I’m most excited to build with Heroes: persistent worlds that you can change in dramatic ways over time. Like Minecraft did with blocks, we could do the same with characters, kingdoms, and stories, enabling an experience unlike anything that’s existed before.

– Nick Walton

I cant wait to test heroes. I am using AI dungeon, NovelAI and ChatGPT for Role Playing, but without contraints and a proper logic, role playing is just 'crative mode'.

Hey all!

Here's our latest dev log! We talk about the process productionizing Heroes so we can make it available to as many players as possible. Check it out and I'd love to hear any thoughts, comments or questions you have!

Heroes Dev Log #8: Productionization (latitude.io)