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:
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A new character slots screen for managing your heroes
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Enhanced inventory management with improved search and filtering
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More intuitive character and achievement displays
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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)
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'.
Are there any news regarding ai dungeon heroes? Is heroes still in development?
Does somebody or you have more information?
wen wen wen
Happy New Year, everyone!
2024 was a big year for AI Dungeon. We saw the introduction of many unique and exciting AI models, powerful new features, and a growing community. You may remember that at the start of 2024, we were putting the finishing touches on Phoenix (our major UI redesign) and launching Mixtral and Mythomax, kicking off the AI Renaissance series of releases. As we reviewed our release page, we’re so proud of our team for all the value we were able to bring you!
To carry that momentum into 2025, we’d like to share a few changes that we’re making to help us give you even more value.
For the last couple of years, we’ve been operating our company as one team. With a team size barely into the double digits, that approach worked well for us as we rebuilt AI Dungeon into a stable, sustainable business and centered our focus on delivering value to you, our players. Having one team brings tight collaboration and focus to our company, and lets us streamline our process of delivering value.
Now, we want to move faster 😈. In particular, we want accelerate how quickly we can ship Heroes to you. Doing so with one team has been a challenge, since launching an ambitious new AI experience like Heroes takes time, focus, specialized skills, and attention. Balancing improvements on AI Dungeon with making progress on Heroes has been a constant challenge.
This year, we’ll be operating as two teams. One team, the AI Game team, will be focused on building Heroes and improving the AI experience on AI Dungeon. This includes training and releasing new models, and improvements to the core AI Dungeon gameplay experience. The AI Game team is being led by Nick, who continues to be a pioneer in merging LLMs, storytelling, and gameplay. We’ve recently made two key hires for this team who joined us officially this week. One is an AI researcher and engineer, who will be able to accelerate the work on improving AI models for Heroes and AI Dungeon. The other is an experienced game system designer to help craft the core gameplay experience for Heroes. They’ll join our lead Narrative Designer, our AI implementation engineer, and our existing AI researcher. We’re excited to have a team who’ll be able to give full focus and attention to Heroes and the AI Game experience on AI Dungeon. No, we don’t have a Heroes release date to announce, but these changes certainly accelerate the timeline.
The second team is our Platform team. The platform team is responsible for maintaining and developing the platform including both user facing platform elements and underlying infrastructure. Community, moderation, and support will also work within this team. They’ll focus on things like making improvements to our Home and Discover pages, improvements to our creator experience, stability and performance, improving and maintaining our cross-platform design system, etc. I’ll be leading the charge on this team, partnering with Ryan who will fill the role of Producer (in addition to his other COO duties—the man wears many hats). This team will also include our UX designer, architect, front end engineers, full stack engineer, QA, and Community/Support staff.
Bonus: there’s also a sneaky third team that Ryan will run, focused on things like HR, Finance, Legal, and general admin for the company. We thought you may appreciate knowing that we do things like comply with laws, pay taxes, and provide benefits for our team 😉. Ryan is also deeply involved in managing our vendor relationships, such as AI providers.
We are anticipating hiring for additional roles this year for both the AI Game and Platform teams. We’ll continue to share updates as we grow the team.
We’re also saying goodbye to some beloved team members. After 5 incredible years, Alan (who cofounded Latitude with Nick) stepped down to focus on his family and personal goals. Corey, who has been leading our community and marketing team, has decided to take time to focus on his family as well. We’re also excited for Kelsie, who is taking the next step in her career and has joined another company. Rogue2, who’s been a key part of our moderation and support team, will also be leaving us soon. Alan, Corey, Kelsie, and Rogue2 will all be missed, and we appreciate their contributions to our community and team. We wish them joy and success!
Our team has changed dramatically over the last few years. Only two current team members (with Nick being one) have been around since before the OpenAI crisis. Over half of our team has joined within the last year. Our newer team members have brought expertise and experience that help us raise the bar of talent at Latitude. We feel more confident than ever that we’re building the right team to bring you the best AI Dungeon and Heroes experience possible.
We hope you’ll forgive us for talking a bit about ourselves. As you know, not all the work we do to improve AI Dungeon shows up in patch notes. Hopefully, this behind the scenes peek into our team building has been useful or even mildly interesting. As always, we appreciate everything you do in supporting AI Dungeon and for being part of our community.