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Bringing AI NPCs to Life with NVIDIA ACE On-Device Small Language Models in Meaning Machine's Dead Meat (Presented by NVIDIA)

Ben Ackland  (Co Founder / Technical Lead, Meaning Machine GB)

Thomas Keane  (Co Founder / Creative Lead, Meaning Machine GB)

Location: Room 3009, West Hall

Date: Thursday, March 20

Time: 2:00 pm - 3:00 pm

Pass Type: All Access Pass, Core Pass, Summits Pass, Expo Pass, Audio Pass, Indie Games Summit Pass - Get your pass now!

Track: Design

Format: Sponsored Session

Vault Recording: TBD

Audience Level: Intermediate

NVIDIA

Dead Meat is a murder mystery game that features freeform conversations with AI-powered NPC “suspects”. The experience lives & dies by the depth of its characters, with players delving into the psychology of the suspects to understand ‘why they did it’. Historically, these characters required the power of LLMs in the cloud, but cloud-based LLMs are challenging for runtime games due to 3rd party costs and online dependency. By working with NVIDIA, Meaning Machine were able to bring Dead Meat’s complex characters “on device”. This involved fine-tuning a Minitron SLM, and integrating NVIDIA ACE with their own Game Conscious™ AI system. The on-device version of Dead Meat delivers the same character depth that was being achieved in the cloud… but now it’s being done locally, on a consumer-grade GPU.

Takeaway

This talk breaks down how this was accomplished, and offers valuable insight to game developers who want to run their AI game locally – with a particular focus on deep & meaningful NPCs.

Intended Audience

Game developers, AI engineers, and game designers interested in the latest LLM-driven characters.



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