Barton
A narrative-driven adventure game set in a retro-futuristic 1970s-inspired world. The player journeys through a set of immersive environments with puzzle elements along with an AI NPC. The NPC is able to understand the words of the player and participate in the game, and the player must learn to cooperate with the NPC to complete the game. By undergoing several trials alongside a thinking, feeling AI companion, we challenge the player to question if they consider their AI companion as more than just a tool.
1. Prove AI Only works with Designers
At this point in game development, people are fascinated with using AI to create fully custom dialogue, yet just about every game that has tried hasn’t created anything past a novel experience. This is the result of relying too much on AI making creative choices and not having designers to guide the project. For this game, we want to prove that AI can be used ethically to enhance an experience, but only when there is a dedicated team behind it.
Why use AI?
2. Immersion for Players
The reason that AI is such an enticing option is its potential to create an interactive conversational experience for users. One that can be fully custom to each one. We can give players an immersive experience of talking to a fleshed-out character that can react to their input intelligently. This can create a bonding experience, unlike anything else.
Settings
One of my jobs for Barton has been to design our settings menu. On this page, I show the process of creating the settings prototype with what settings I am advocating for. These include but are not limited to: settings for key mapping, readability, and captioning.
UX for the Team
Part of my job as design lead, and UX designer, has been to create tools for the team to function smoothly. This includes game design docs, dialogue planning, and priority documents.
The first issue that came up when formulating this game idea was the controversy of AI in media creation. We balanced this by creating strict ethical rules, becoming educated in how we could use AI, and really listening to why people are cautious about the process.
The biggest issue though, is how new the whole process is. I was in charge of doing research on games that also incorporate AI in their dialogue and I found that many games did not handle it well. There is also a huge deficit in documentation, so we had to work blind. This was especially hard on our engineers.
Lastly, introducing AI introduces a very chaotic factor that is hard to account for fully. We had to iterate on how our screenplay should be written to get our AI to improvise the way we needed it.