Mystfighter - A visual novel powered by Character.ai

Inspiration

As passionate gamers, all the team members have always enjoyed good stories and fun experiences. The visual novel genre, being one of the most story-driven video game genre, is full of titles where, despite having amazing stories, their lack of immersion often diminishes the title's quality. We aim to solve that problem by giving the player full control of its actions inside our game. That include full situational control and 100% customizable dialogues. Those features, paired with an AI-powered character, help create a fun and immersive story which won't be the same every time you play.

What it does

It uses a language model hosted in the character.ai platform which interprets a custom character that we designed. We combined this with a nice UI and with a sentiment analysis system (also AI powered) to create a real-time reactive avatar of the character for better immersion.

How we built it

We built it using character.ai, python (using several packages such as pygame and especially pyCAI.characterai) and live2d Cubism for the avatar.

Challenges we ran into

We wanted to use Renpy, a very powerful and used game engine, to develop our project. Sadly, we couldn't integrate several of our python packages into the software, so we had to create from scratch a very basic game engine using pygame, which has been very challenging.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

Creating a simple yet functional game engine from scratch. Learning to use live2d Cubism software. Team management

What we learned

A ton of python. Live2d Cubism. How to create realistic characters in character.ai

What's next for Mystfighter - A visual novel powered by Character.ai

The future is limitless! This prototype shows that it's possible to create an awesome and customizable experience using AI. Next step? A full story completely crafted following the preferences of the player. With alive characters and exciting adventures.