Hidden Door unveils new art style for its AI-based narrative game

02.11.2023 - 13:27 / venturebeat.com / Ai

Hidden Door has unveiled an updated artistic vision behind its new game where generative AI creates the narrative for humans to play.

With this game, which is still in the testing stages, the development team isn’t creating a singular narrative for the game. Rather, it’s creating a library of tools that can help it bring an endless variety of stories to life so that players can come back over and over and experience a new story.

The tools include generative AI, which creates a new story based on The Wizard of Oz in response to text prompts entered by the human player. The company began limited tests back in June for its digital tabletop game role-playing game set in the land of the Wizard of Oz, a public domain intellectual property that includes 14 books written by L. Frank Baum, said Hilary Mason, CEO of Hidden Door, in an interview with GamesBeat at our recent GamesBeat Next event.

The creators fed those works into the large language model (LLM) for the AI, and then it spits out a story set in that universe once players describe what they want in the story.

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In these games, the AI serves as a a kind of game master or dungeon master, reacting to the choices that you make in the game and guiding you through the story.

“We are giving people the tools for creation and making sure that AI is doing what AI is good at,” Mason said.

In the game, players go on unique adventures with their friends in a world true to the Oz novels, all led by an AI narrator that adapts to their choices to create a personalized experience, every time. In this world, players can do whatever they want – the platform allows for endless adventures in the Land of Oz. Join forces with the Wicked Witch of the West, go on quests across the Land of Oz, or simply stay in Kansas and play with Toto.

Hidden Door’s AI engine adapts to player choices, creating a unique story every time while remaining true to the fictional world the game is set in.

All of that stays the same, but Hilary Mason, CEO of Hidden Door, said in an interview with GamesBeat that the art style is being updated so that it appeals to older audiences, in contrast to the art style that focused more on kids back in June. In addition to generating its own art, Hidden Door also launched a Discord bot to help with character generation.

“We’ve designed a new art style for game, which comes from a bunch of directions,” Mason said. “One of which is that when we launched the company, we were initially inspired by creating games for kids and middle schoolers. And so our