Endless Adventures CEO Jordan Weisman came out of stealth at our GamesBeat Summit 2023 event last year, and talked about the intersection of gaming, AI and user-generated content.
And now his company has deeper demo of how you can use the company’s Adventure Forge tools to create narrative games.
Adventure Forge is intended to be a powerful toolset aimed at empowering game masters, storytellers, authors, and artists to create their own narrative-rich video games, with no coding required, Weisman said in an interview with GamesBeat. It uses AI to enable non-programmer creators to be more productive on their own in creating games.
The goal is to empower designers, writers, and artists to create narratively rich video games and interactive fiction with its “no-code” authoring platform. The platform aims to democratize narrative game creation and experiences by empowering creators with easy-to-use tools to design and share their own video games and stories with the community.
This means that Adventure Forge could empower a solo creator to get much farther along in making a game — even self-publishing one — before going out to raise funding or hiring more experienced team members and even programmers. It makes game development more efficient, but it isn’t meant to eliminate game development jobs. And it can open up game development to a wider group of people who don’t have the skills on their own to make games.
“These games are much more narratively deep than what you’re gonna see a Roblox game. What we wanted to do was give people the entire spectrum of the narrative game genre. And then let them mix and match in really interesting ways,” Weisman said. “That’s anything from choose your own path to point and click adventures, visual novels, dating sims, isometric RPGs, or puzzle games. But we’ve also seen people using it for interactive fiction. I wanted to create a handful of very powerful, interesting affordances for people and let them go wild with it, which is what we’re really starting to see for people who have a story to tell or an interactive story to tell.”
Weisman participated in the “Power to the People” fireside chat at the GamesBeat Summit 2023 last year in a session that explored how the latest developments in no-code authoring and AI will change the user-generated content (UGC) landscape in gaming. He spoke with Emmanuel de Maistre, CEO of Scenario.gg.
So far, the company has raised over $2 million and it has a team of 35 people, some in the Pacific Northwest and some in Colombia, the Philippines and Australia. Weisman expects to raise a new round of funding.
How it started
The platform is the brainchild of Weisman, a serial gaming entrepreneur known for narrative-driven franchises such as BattleTech, MechWarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies. His previous entrepreneurial efforts included Virtual World Entertainment, acquired by the Disney family, FASA Interactive, acquired by Microsoft, Wizkids, acquired by Topps Inc, and Harebrained Schemes.
In 2018, Paradox Entertainment acquired Harebrained Schemes for $7.5 million. Weisman left the company and took a detour out of games to work on augmented reality technology for Walmart. After that, he considered retiring from making games, which has done for more than 40 years.
But as a side project, he used some of his own money to fund a new project that focused on AI and game-building tools. Eventually, the work started paying off and he started Bellevue, Washington-based Endless Adventures. Weisman formally incorporated the company in 2021 and he has raised a round of funding from prominent angels in the gaming space.
He added, “I think people are going to make some very, very deep and interesting RPGs with this tool. These tools are significantly better than any of the tools we had at Harebrained Schemes.”
A glimpse of Tales of Fortunata
A year later after unveiling the startup, Weisman noted this is all a work in progress.
“When we ship the game [and the four settings and tools], Adventure Forge will come with a kind of robust graphics library for people to work with right away. They can of course upload their own graphics to give it their own look and feel. We’ll have tools for them to do that. But if they want to just start making stuff, then we have four settings for them to do that,” he said.
One of the settings is a game world set in the Renaissance dubbed Tales of Fortunata. Weisman showed me a demo of this world, which has isometric 2D characters moving around a Renaissance-era town with a variety of buildings and characters.
“This one was intentionally designed to walk through various forms of narrative gaming, just to kind of show the basics for how you choose your own path with text narratives,” he said. “And then you transition into visual levels, where many different responses cause the characters to take different actions.”
The demo
In the demo, he showed how someone with a good idea but not so many skills in game creation can use AI to help them make story-based games.
The core of the idea was invest in engineering so that game designers could create something with no code. Too often, the game developers have create a document for their designs, send it over to engineering, wait for them to execute it, and then see how well it works.
Weisman said it is easy to get AI to create something game-like with a prompt, but it’s very hard to get the AI to modify the prompt so that the quality can be much better or it expresses exactly what the creator wants. Endless Adventures goes further than that, and it also goes further than many human-created games in the narrative arc it makes possible.
Beyond doing the programming, the tools will also tap AI to help with designs where you’re writing text, such as describing your universe and describing characters and scenes. If you want, the AI will help you come up with some scratch dialogue or scratch descriptions.
A player can place lights in the environment. A better lighting model is on the way.
“This demo is a quick illustration of what’s coming together,” he said.
The player can play the game and modify the design too. In the demo, Weisman showed off a point-and-click isometric 2D adventure.
If a character has a ballroom gown, she can go in the front door. But if she doesn’t she will have to look for another entrance. She can move barrels around and then get into through an open window. Inside, you might find a jewelry box, but it has combination lock. You find a clue for it, but you have to solve it before progressing. All of these events are scripted, with different outcomes opened up to match the player’s choices.
“To make all this happen, you don’t need to code,” he said. “We want to be able to have completely fluid collision and movement on a map. As the designer, you can move things around. How does that change things?”
How it works
The AI in the game tools can eliminate the need for the game creator to do programming. And Weisman said this tool feature only became possible after a year of trying out different types of paradigms for automatically creating game logic.
If you try to create something that is too sophisticated, then you get a kind of “spaghetti mess of lines everywhere,” he said. That means the language is powerful, but you want to be able to get rid of the syntax because that widens the number of people who can create something.
“Getting rid of the need to know syntax means that everything you create in the game — a character state, a proper title, an entity, whatever it is — can automatically populate directly into the correct dropdown menus,” he said.
“Where AI comes in for us is to help people make the assets that they want to work with,” he said. “Eventually, we’ll see chatbots that are actually controllable. “Chatbots can be endlessly chatty, but they don’t play the role they need to play in the game yet. Players don’t want to endlessly chat with an NPC (non-player character). They want to go on their adventure and NPCs have a specific role in that adventure. We’re seeing things that will take us in that direction.”
He brought up another concept called weighted navigation.
“This is a way of breaking free of the paradigm of your classic branching system. So the classic branching system has to know all future nodes, and all the logic for which node is selected,” he said. “This means that these nodes get super complex. Every time we try to add something new, a new option for the player to go, that node gets even more complex because you have to go back through and recraft the logic of those nodes.”
He added, “And one of the paradigms that we’ve come to is this concept where the current node is ignorant of all future nodes. And it just simply requests the nodes to evaluate themselves. So it moves it from a branching paradigm to a search paradigm. And in the search paradigm, then I can throw as many options for the players I can conceive of.”
And he said. “And each one has its own logic about when is valid in the game state. And then if it’s valid, how interesting it is, using all the current variables of the game state. So this allows the designer to go figure out what’s the next scene and where the player should go next.”
It can take the player to the most interesting thing the NPC can say next, and that may prompt the player to break away and do something else. It can be a very powerful tool. You can have contextually relevant responses from an NPC without having an explosion of potential conversations.
Anything you change in the system’s rules can be immediately reflected in the game world that you are testing.
“The way that our build system works or authoring tool works is that everything is constructed out of scenes. And we have three types of scenes available currently,” he said.
One is a basic scene with a static background where events take place, like conversations, 2D interactions, and more. One type of 2D scene has a dynamic 2D background like what you might se n visual novels. There’s an isometric scene where events take place on top of it.
You can have a text event, like a conversation, or a 2D event where there is some movement in the scene.
He said one of the key concepts that goes throughout Adventure Forge is this concept of “state.” The characters, props, tiles, 2D modules that you can put in the game all have a state and the states are made up by the game designer to be anything they want.
“And each state controls what the object looks like. And how it behaves. When a character puts on a dress, it moves from one character state to another,” he said. “When the barrels are moved, those barrels can open up and explode. They can do anything they want. Because when the behavior changes, it can change its collision and it can change. We can change the post of the character and we can load different graphics that are in different states. And then we control this through logic. That logic shows things that are related conditions, and that in turn can be translated into the programming that the tool creates.”
The level of talent required
The designer of the game can create very sophisticated scenes and that leads to sophisticated logic and automated programming.
“Everything is based on drop-down menus,” he said. “If I have a a conditional statement, then I want to say that only this should be true after that.”
Games are still pretty complicated, even without all the programming.
The game has color-coded flows for things like “triggers.” For instance, when a character is doing something, then a particular kind of logic will run as a consequence of that action. There are different colors like yellow for conversation trees. If you start having a conversation, then tree helps guide where that conversation will go. If combat ensues, then the consequences of that must be mapped out.
You have to be able to pay attention to what is happening in the game and what is going to happen moment to moment. In that sense, it’s a professional game authoring system.
“You can use it to make really deep and interesting games. The key thing we’re trying to eliminate is that you don’t need to know how to program,” he said. “You just have to think about your design in depth. And AI is going to help with all sorts of different things for asset generation and other things. But we feel strongly that game design notes from humans. And trying to design via prompt is is ultimately an ineffective way because games have thousands of little dials that you have to have explicit control of. “
He added, “So we will have eventually be able to have AI help write logic for you. But the logic will then be expressed in all those drop down menus so that you can go back and tweak.”
Generating art?
One of the areas where new game creators can trip up is on the quality of art. Endless Adventures is working with generative AI companies to generate isometric game assets for the universes that Endless Adventures is publishing.
You can put tiles down and start painting on them to create an environment for a game. You can create art or use the vibrant art from the game tool’s Renaissance template.
“The games can have a very different look and feel,” he said. “This one has a mini game that is a classic memory card game. You can use our existing tile set. You can upload your own graphics. We’ll have an export tool that you can take into Photoshop and just paint over it by hand and then bring it back into our tool. And everything lines up.”
If you have the artistic skill, you can embark on your own path for the art. In one scene, you explore a building and then at some point it evolves into turn-based combat.
Early closed beta results
Endless Adventures has invited game players, tabletop game masters, authors, and artists to create their adventures next.
“It’s been really great to have people who get it from the industry come and help us,” he said. “We are in the closed beta and we’re blown away by what people are making. It’s very exciting to see people things you don’t expect them to do. One of our testers had a Hades style with painted backgrounds and foregrounds, with isometric characters within that context. It used our standard tool and didn’t require any coding.”
There are perhaps 20 videos ready now as tutorials. You don’t have to have a degree in game design to use the tool. The team has spent a lot of time on the interaction tool.
In the coming months, there will be more AI integration to empower people.
“The the AI is actually the easy part. The hard part is getting the ability for humans to express complex creative ideas through the AI,” he said.
There was one example of a game where there is a school room and one of the children is told she can’t play. So she decides to take her toys homme with her and the toys take away the color of the world and it turns black and white. If you’re nice to the girl, she puts the color back in the world.
Weisman said, “It illustrates the point of when you unleash creativity, you get all sorts of amazing things you never conceived of.
What comes next
The company anticipates going into early access soon. Endless Adventures will like charge a fee for creation tools that people will use to make games. And it will find ways for people to play the games created with the tools, like games in the Fortunata universe.
“We’ve seen people ramp up in the system within a day,” he said. “Even with people coming from different fields. You can bring in any of your own characters. We have a library of characters for those four universes we will start with,” he said.
“It started started with me putting in all the early stupid money. The ball started rolling. We started to bring in other people from the industry. We are out now talking to VCs and strategics.”
Weisman eventually thinks the company will have a marketplace for artists who will be creating artwork for game designers who are creating games in the Endless Adventures system. It will be isometric art, with a certain kind of art style.
While there is a lot of opportunity for user-generated content in this system, Weisman believes the first product will focus on narrative games. These can include anything from text adventures to visual interactive novels like Choices or Episode. It will also enable anime-based interactive visual novels and isometric role-playing games.
“It’s quite a lot of power for people to create with,” Weisman said. “To do this in another way, you would have to be very dedicated to tweaking a game and then creating a prompt to create your game.”