3 minutes in Selkie. One shot. No camera cuts.

Selkie is an environment we are creating to share what it's like to play in a world populated with Bitpart.AI characters, powered by our AI engine, Director, and Planner.

We are inspired by games that deliver immersive, living, breathing worlds, like Rockstar's Red Dead Redemption series. RDR2 took over 8 years to develop, with a team of 2,000 people, and a dev budget north of $250M. That's out of reach for most studios.

Our team at Bitpart is tiny. While it is far from an apples-to-apples comparison between RDR and Selkie, Selkie is a demonstration of what developers can create in an hour or two with Bitpart. Creating a living world can typically take teams weeks, or months, and in some cases years. We are trying to level the playing field to empower studios of any size to create dynamic living environments, freeing developers to focus their time on other things like story, quests, and combat. 

In Selkie, the player can wander freely, encountering NPCs everywhere, who are traveling from place to place, doing their jobs, browsing in shops, or relaxing at the tavern. You can overhear NPCs as you walk by, and interrupt any NPC to engage in interactive conversation. A world filled with autonomous beings, multi-agent behaviors, and ample opportunities for player agency is world players want to spend time in. I WANT TO GO THERE.

Something I loved about RDR was the opportunity to just follow one NPC over long periods of time, watching how they carry out their day. We want to replicate this experience. About two minutes into this video, we start following the cook as he heads out to fill a bucket at the town well, to add to his soup recipe when he returns.

This is our biggest release to date. Bitpart.AI V0.3 Beta tightly integrates many things we've been working on. Some of the most notable highlights of V0.3 include:

• New archetypes (including Townsperson, Bar Patron).

• Player dialogue with NPCs.

• Deep integration with Unreal's Smart Objects, for props, furniture, idle spots, and workstations.

• Metahumans & lip syncing.

• Coppola authoring tools, with optional AI assistance from Claude.

• Bitpart University tutorials.

The public release of Coppola is a big one, as this allows anyone to customize the physical behavior and dialogue Bitpart Archetypes, or create entirely new Archetypes.

If you are working on a game in Unreal, and it has characters in it, you should take a look at Bitpart. It will save you a whole lot of time!

Get Bitpart from Fab. Do the tutorials. Make great games. Start here: https://www.bitpart.ai/sign-up

Along with the release of Bitpart V0.2, we are rolling out Bitpart University. It is now possible for anyone to get Bitpart from Epic's Fab marketplace, and learn how to bring game worlds to life with Bitpart characters through Bitpart University. Bitpart U is a set of guided tutorials with text and video content, walking developers of any level through all of the released features of Bitpart, including:

• Archetypes & Smart Objects.

• Authoring behaviors & dialogue with Coppola.

• Generating content with optional AI assistance in Coppola.

• Adding human or AI voiceovers to dialogue.

• Creating new Actions & Smart Objects.

• Adding Metahuman meshes to Bitpart characters.

Become a Bitpart pro. No Unreal experience necessary. Available here: https://lnkd.in/eX7NpF8d