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Endless Adventures was unveiled today at the GamesBeat Summit 2023 event, where CEO Jordan Weisman spoke about the intersection of gaming, AI, and user-generated content.
weisman announced adventure forge, a powerful toolset aimed at empowering game masters, storytellers, authors, and artists to create their own narrative-rich video games—no coding required. It now uses AI in a couple of places with the goal of allowing non-programmers to be more productive on their own in making games.
The platform is the brainchild of Weisman, a serial game entrepreneur known for narrative franchises like BattleTech, MechWarrior, Shadowrun, and Crimson Skies. His previous business endeavors included Virtual World Entertainment, acquired by the Disney family, FASA Interactive, acquired by Microsoft, Wizkids, acquired by Topps Inc, and Harebrained Schemes.
How it started
In 2018, Paradox Entertainment acquired Harebrained Schemes for $7.5 million. Weisman left the company and diverted from gaming to work on augmented reality technology for Walmart. After that, he considered retiring from the gaming business where he has 40 years of experience.
But as a side project, he used some of his own money to fund a new project that focused on artificial intelligence and game creation tools. Eventually, the work began to pay off and he started Endless Adventures, based in Bellevue, Washington, Weisman said in an interview with GamesBeat. Weisman formally incorporated the company two years ago.
“Our mission is to discover and promote the next generation of game designers and storytellers across a wide range of game genres,” Weisman said. Our first offering, Adventure Forge, focuses on narrative games, from text-based visual novels to choose your own path, to isometric RPGs like the Shadowrun Returns series we developed at Harebrained Schemes.”
“It was long before the new AI talk,” he said. “I started working on it. And we just had a little project with myself and a couple of engineers, working on things for several years, until we figured out all the paradigms for how to get rid of coding. We wanted to have a true no-code system.”
“We developed an innovative approach of using highly contextual dropdown menus that are like Mad Libs,” he added. “You create all the logical sentences you want and conditional statements and results through these dropdowns. There are many other paradigms in terms of how you organize large narrative projects and find the content that you want.
the central idea
The core of the idea was to invest in engineering so that game designers could create something without code. Too often, game developers create a document for their designs, send it off to engineering, wait for them to run it, and then see how well it works.
“That loop is very slow,” Weisman said. “I wanted to empower gamers, writers, artists, designers, and game masters to go and create their own games and stories. We didn’t start with an AI approach. And even at this point I wouldn’t call it an AI-focused tool by any means. We’re just using AI in a couple of places to enhance the designer, give them little advantages to help speed up their process.”
Weisman said: “It’s mainly about empowering your creativity and human creativity. You want to be able to do this without having to have engineers on your team. We empower our players with a no-code authoring system. They can create little game AIs for their characters, which are really important. That’s in the traditional sense of game AI, where you’re developing your non-player characters and their behaviors.”
The AI also helps with layouts where you’re writing text, such as describing your universe and describing characters and scenes. If you want, you have the help of the AI to create a draft dialog or draft descriptions.
“Behind the scenes, we’re doing a very sophisticated quick-generate suite based on the stuff you’ve written before,” Weisman said. “As you get further and further into your game writing, you get more contextual suggestions from the AI. The creator can decide whether to use those hints or not.
On another front, Endless Adventures is working with Scenario.gg, a generative AI company, on generating isometric game assets for the universes Endless Adventures is publishing.
“The model is trained exclusively on our own art and creates isometric assets in the correct perspective,” Weisman said. “It’s a little bit complicated. And we have generated thousands of resources for our players to work with. But we are sure that the creativity of our players and our designers will come up with things that we have not done for them. So we wanted to give them a potential where they could use generative AI to generate new things for their games.”
For example, Endless Adventures has not created an ice cream stand for a game. But the player creator may want to build one. So, they’ll take advantage of the AI for that and generate one that will be based on all of the art from Endless Adventures so that the ice cream stand looks completely appropriate when placed in the context of all of the thousands of other art assets that Endless Adventures has created.
The company has 22 employees and is closing a $1.5 million SAFE round right now.
What comes next
Endless Adventures will begin inviting players, board game masters, authors, and artists to create their adventures later this year. Interested players can sign up on their website to receive more information as it becomes available.
“As a lifelong game designer and storyteller, I believe that games are a human-powered creative endeavor, and throughout my career I have seen how the tools and techniques have empowered designers like me to bring their games to life. visions,” Weisman said. “Adventure Forge is designed to do just that with its fast, easy-to-use, code-free authoring system, tremendous design depth and flexibility, and thoughtful integration of optional designer-oriented AI writing assistance and script generation. isometric assets. I think it will drive a new wave of innovation in narrative game design and storytelling quality.”
Jordan participated in the “Power to the People” fireside chat at GamesBeat Summit 2023 this week with a session that explored how the latest developments in no-code creation and AI will change the landscape of user-generated content (UGC) in the games. He spoke with Emmanuel de Maistre, CEO of Scenario.gg.
Endless Adventures’ Adventure Forge empowers designers, writers, and artists to create narrative-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 games and stories with the community.
Weisman eventually believes the company will have a market for artists creating artwork for game designers creating games on the Endless Adventures system. It will be isometric art, with a certain kind of art style.
While there are plenty of opportunities for user-generated content on this system, Weisman believes that the first product will focus on narrative games. These can include anything from text adventures to interactive visual novels like Choices or Episode. It will also enable anime-based interactive visual novels and isometric role-playing games.
“I love that art form,” Weisman said. “I love when people tell their stories. When I look back on my career, which is torn between board games and video games, the joy of the table is that, in those circumstances, the games I created set the table. And then the players created the stories. That’s what I see us doing here. We are trying to set the table and empower people to create their own.”
Isn’t it necessary to retire?
So why was this more interesting than retirement for Weisman?
“I am passionate about the importance of narrative games and the impact it has on players,” Weisman said. All different types of game formats have their own benefits and drawbacks, but I think one of the main benefits of narrative games is that it’s one of the few that can actually expose you to new cultures, new characters, new worlds, and new thoughts, and help change even the way you think. And I strongly believe that we would all benefit from more diverse voices telling stories. And we would all benefit from more innovation in the space. The hope is that Adventure Forge enhances both of those things.”
Looking at the past 40 years, Weisman said: “The impact gaming has had on our culture, in all the positive ways and unfortunately some negative ones, is simply staggering. It’s very exciting how many people are playing and how diverse the audiences are that are playing. All the demographic and psychographic games play, and that’s super exciting. As an entertainment format, it’s more exciting than ever to participate in. As a business, it’s also quite daunting to get involved. But that’s not that different than it’s always been. I think generative AI is going to change a lot of industries and I think the games industry is really at the forefront.”
But he still believes that humans are better at creativity, and the role of AI will be to help humans with that.
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