In the world of interactive fiction games, AI Dungeon is a particular one that immediately comes to mind. It is a free to play text adventure game created by Latitude, Inc. and released in December 2019 for both PC and mobile platforms. In order to generate the stories, AI Dungeon uses artificial intelligence. Specifically speaking, AI Dungeon makes use of OpenAI’s text prediction model which is one of the best in terms of fabricating the next words in a sentence.

Software developer Nick Walton took part in a hackathon in March 2019 where he promptly submitted AI Dungeon as his entry. A hackathon is a type of affair for programmers, developers, and other individuals in the software designing community gather to create fully operational software. Throughout the particular hackathon that Walton joined, AI Dungeon became an instantaneous hit. Furthermore, there were ai dungeon online of AI Dungeon.

AI Dungeon is Nick Walton’s “passion project” that eventually resulted to his company Latitude, Inc. A typical trend among indie games slash passion projects are its perceived success due to the efforts of the supporting community. Consequently, AI Dungeon upheld its free to play framework since it is consistently preserved by the community through Patreon crowd funding, donations, voluntary code work, and other open source projects.

The release of the first version in May 2019 saw the game with around 2,000 players. When it was relaunched in December 2019, now donning its shiny GPT-2 model, the success of the game was palpable. In only two weeks, AI Dungeon servers were peaking at 700 players at a time. Furthermore, 100,000 were estimated to have played the game eventually and they generated at least 500,000 stories. Six weeks later, AI Dungeon had surpassed the millionth mark with 6,000,000 distinct stories told. Community backing also never stopped as seen on Patreon donations which were roughly a staggering $15,000 a month.

In the world of interactive fiction games, there exists a very important factor that makes AI Dungeon distinctive. Due to the technological handicaps beforehand, the production of stories on interactive fiction games are already set. Essentially, the stories are fixed and the fictional world of that game is repetitive. AI Dungeon uses the GPT-2 model of OpenAI which has a full 1.5 billion parameters determined by datasets from 8 million webpages. The virtually infinite assortment of datasets permit a natural generation of texts and stories on multiple kinds of platforms. All thanks to GPT-2, AI Dungeon is a universe with limitless possibilities where the limits are only on the side of the gamers.

AI Dungeon is probably the best game for inventive and artistic gamers. Apart from the infinite generation of content, the stories that can be created are also unique owing to OpenAI’s GPT-2. In the game, there are also seven situations that players can choose from: fantasy, mystery, apocalyptic, zombies, cyberpunk, custom, and other archived models. Despite its lack of intense graphics or sounds, AI Dungeon has become one of the best engaging games to date.