An AI NPC uses a language model to answer what a player actually says, instead of picking from a dialogue tree. The design problem is keeping it in character, in lore and within the rating while it improvises.
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Classic NPC AI decides what a character does: behaviour trees, utility scores, pathfinding. LLM NPCs add what a character says, in response to anything. That is the attraction and the risk: players will ask the blacksmith about the ending, try to make the priest swear, and paste in instructions to break it. A character that answers all of that freely is not a character.
So the model is the voice, not the authority. The writers own a character profile, what the character knows and does not know at each point in the story, and a lore base it retrieves from. Game state changes, such as giving an item, starting a quest or turning hostile, happen only through a small set of actions the designers expose and the game validates. The model can propose; the game decides.
Latency and cost are design constraints too. We budget each line, use smaller or local models where they are good enough, cache common exchanges, and keep a scripted line ready whenever a response is late or rejected.
We test with the players you are most worried about. The evaluation set is adversarial: jailbreak attempts, spoiler fishing, harassment, lore traps and long sessions that drift. Writers score samples for voice; the gate for shipping is the rate of out-of-character, out-of-lore and out-of-rating lines, measured before launch and monitored afterwards.
If a character is voiced with synthetic speech, the performer’s consent and the terms of their agreement come first. Players are told when they are talking to a generative character. Both are production decisions for your team; we build the hooks that make them enforceable.
text or voice
character · lore · progress
line plus proposed action
rating · spoilers · lore
only exposed actions apply
late, rejected or off-script
A non-player character whose dialogue is generated by a language model in response to what the player says, rather than chosen from a pre-written tree. Its behaviour, such as movement and combat, usually still runs on conventional game AI. The useful versions are bounded by a writer-owned character profile and lore, and can only change the game through actions the designers allow.
Sometimes. Small language models can run locally on PCs and current consoles for short, constrained exchanges, which removes server cost and network latency. Richer conversation usually needs a hosted model. Many designs mix the two, with a local model for routine lines and a server call for the moments that matter, and an authored line if either is too slow.
You assume they will try. The character’s instructions are separated from player input, outputs are checked against rating and lore filters, and the model cannot change game state except through validated actions. Adversarial playtesting before launch, and monitoring after it, show how often it slips, and when it does the fallback is an authored line.
What we built, what stage it is at, and a link to the live thing wherever there is one.
yourOS is an operating system with an AI at its heart. You talk to it like a person, out loud or typed. It makes your calls, plans your days and works on your projects with a crew of agents, on your own private server. Our own product, built from the first commit; the waitlist is open.
Website, backend and app assets for Sonora, a free AI sound-therapy app on iOS and Android published by Cognitive AI.
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In closed beta: Roxy, a private AI assistant with permanent memory running on infrastructure the user owns. Brand, site, product, backend and conversational design.
Live at coherence.com: brand identity generated with AI agents we directed, the motion system and website for the group behind Sonora, AboutAI, WakeUp and MudShadows. Agent work remains in build.
Live at domainbooth.com for DomainBooth, a premium domain brokerage: a new animated mark, every page redesigned and rebuilt with designed mobile layouts, and a custom CMS for its sales record, featured names, press and enquiries.
Bring one character and its lore; we will prototype the conversation and show you how it fails before players do.
30-minute technical call · no deck