The Dailies - Ep. 5 - A Bartender with a Plan
We’ve been working mostly in private for almost two years now. We’d like to start sharing glimpses of what we’re working on, and get feedback from developers who might use our characters in their games.
We plan to share a short video every week or two going forward. We’re imposing a strict limit of 1 minute videos, to keep things focused, interesting, and easily consumable.
We’ll kick things off with a look at the bartender we created for our private GDC 2024 demo in March. After closing our Seed round in early February, we immediately turned our attention to creating a live demo in Unity for GDC. Below is a 1-minute look at Clementine.
The video highlights how Bitpart characters proactively pursue their jobs in the environment, interact with props, execute multi-step plans, and can be interrupted at any time for conversations. We accomplish behavior via our AI Director that runs on the cloud. Technically, our AI Director employs a novel implementation of a Hierarchical Task Network (HTN) planner. Our HTN is unique in running from a planning domain learned from data, that fluidly mixes physical and speech acts, and is significantly larger scale than HTNs that ship in games today. Our planner is also natively multi-agent, but more on that later.
Editing the video down to 1 minute required cutting footage of several other things we want to highlight. Maybe they will become the focus of future episodes. The missing elements include examples of the character’s memory of Player behavior, and how that influences her affinity for the Player (positively or negatively), and impacts her behavior in the future,
Our full GDC demo was about 7 minutes long, and includes a broader cast of characters. More to come in future weeks.
If you would like to explore using Bitpart characters in your own game(s), you can sign up on the waitlist for our Tech Preview: