Soul City

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  The Soul City Start page!

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  A small snippet of our large city

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  A closer look at our cityscape

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  Spontaneous Interactions

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  Day at the park

Inspiration

We were inspired by games like My Singing Monsters and city simulators, and by the idea that people can create their own music by layering sounds in the way they want. We wanted to explore how AI driven characters and layered sound could give us fun social interaction and something creative and playful, letting people express themselves in the process!

What it does

Soul City is an interactive city sandbox playground where people can choose to observe or interact. People will constantly be moving around the map and talking to each other, making unique interactions since each is connected to its own AI agent complete with their own pre-written backstory. If you choose, you can pick people up off the ground and put them together in different combinations, making different music as you choose!

How we built it

We used Unity as the base for Soul City, while also implementing the multiple AI Agents using the Google Gemini API, and tweaking music bites using the Reaper DAW.

Challenges we ran into

This was an incredibly large-scale project that involved a lot of moving parts that needed to be brainstormed, planned, and executed. Some of the hardest included synchronizing many audio tracks without drift, balancing AI behavior, dynamically changing movement states, creating pathfinding for the citizens, and making a clean and creative gameplay loop.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

We are super proud of how everything comes together in our City, with each pieces of the city ground itself, the moving people, the music, and the interactability coming together in a way that feels natural, after each being developed separately by different members of our team.

What we learned

We learned a lot about real-time audio scheduling, multi-agent AI interaction, and most importantly working as a team to separate the work and then integrate.

What's next for Soul City

We hope to add a larger catalogue of music that people can switch between, and allow for more variability and changes to the music so that users can be more free to express themselves! We also want to continue working on more city maps and locations.

Built With

• c#
• geminiapi
• reaper
• unity