Why improvisational game design is making AI-powered games go viral

There’s a growing appetite among gamers for native AI games – and it has everything to do with the freedom they give players to improvise and do things that were never possible before in games. 

In May, Playroom launched their first native AI game, Death by AI, and saw it quickly grow to 20 million players. As CEO Tabish Ahmed shared with us earlier in the year, their goal was to leverage generative AI to create more interactive game loops. Tabish credits the viral party game’s success to the unprecedented agency it allows players. The core game loop requires players to come up with creative ways to escape deadly scenarios before an AI character judges whether they live or die.

Jam and Tea, an indie studio founded by Riot Games veterans, is also seeing the benefits of improvisational gameplay in native AI games. In November, they launched Retail Mage, a game with novel AI-powered game loops that allow players to do almost anything they want in their game world.  A multiplayer simulation game, Retail Mage casts players and up to three friends as retail support agents in a magical furniture store where their job is to help customers that come in with all kinds of odd wants and desires. 

“The thing that AI really unlocks is the improvisational nature of play,” said M. Yichao, Chief Creative Officer at Jam and Tea in a conversation with us recently. “We went from video games being very much a scripted environment and experience to the possibility of playful exploration and invention that allows players to do things they never thought they could. With that adaptability, each time they play they can try new things, take new approaches, and explore new environments.”

Novelty and agency have always been important to gamers with a whole body of research showing that player agency boosts replayability and flow in games. Generative AI-powered gameplay that leaves space for player improvisation is just a new avenue to maximize this. 

In this post, we’ll explore:

• What improvisation looks like in native AI games
• The benefits of improvisation
• How to design games with AI to create more improvisational fun 

Improvisation mechanics in AI games

The ability to improvise in games is something gamers have long found exciting.The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild is a great example of a traditional game that gamers loved precisely because of its adaptability. Breath of the Wild gave players a set of tools that they could do a number of surprising things with – allowing them to experiment and play in different ways. Zach Ryan from IGN summed up the effect of that gameplay well at the time: “I like the stories that are in Zelda games but ultimately it’s about gameplay. I believe that the narrative that comes out of this game is going to be more of that playground feeling [of people saying], ‘You won’t believe what I did last night in Zelda! I jumped off a mountaintop and slid down on my shield!’”

What’s new about this next generation of games is the additional space that AI opens up for players to experiment. Breath of the Wild was able to accomplish a lot with a physics engine but, with AI, game designers can also leverage logic engines and LLMs to make even more things possible. 

That’s expected to lead to highly individualized gameplay experiences. Creator Corbin Brown expressed it well after playing Inworld and Ubisoft’s NEO NPC demo at GDC 2024, “It really adds another layer,” he said, “because everyone’s experience is different.” In the demo, Corbin interacted with Bloom, an NPC whose trust he had to gain to join the resistance. Because Bloom can ingest real-time inputs from the player, he was able to remember that Corbin had an affinity for burgers and bring it up later in the conversation, something that impressed and delighted Corbin. 

It was AI demos like the NEO NPC demo that inspired Yichao to create Retail Mage since they showed how AI could be leveraged in games to empower players with more choice through things like customizable relationships with characters, characters with agentic goals, and advanced role-playing capabilities. “We wanted to take some pieces of that and put it together into an actual game and give players a chance to play with it,” he shared

Setting Retail Mage in a magical world gave them a narrative justification for suspending normal conventions about what’s possible and AI gave them the technical capabilities to accomplish that. 

In Retail Mage, that means that players can do things they might not expect would be possible. “A core part of what we saw as the promise of AI in games is really opening up the game world to be more responsive. We wanted to create a game where players can change the environment as much as possible,” Yichao said. “In a typical video game, usually there's some pre-programmed interactions you can have. You can sit in a chair, maybe you can even put it in your inventory. In Retail Mage, you can take a chair apart for parts, you can carve your name into it, you can light it on fire, and the world will evaluate your character's abilities and decide if it’s possible.”

Game devs who have been in charge of narrative design for AI games have also talked about AI NPC’s as a real-time performance they direct. “Setting up smart AI NPCs with Inworld changed the writing process significantly,” explained Eva Jobses, the writer on Cygnus Enterprises. “Rather than writing each distinct dialogue, it felt like I'd been put in the director's chair, outlining what I was looking for in broad strokes through adjusting character traits and motivations. I had to convey the key points of world building and story to the AI and then let the AI take off from there.” 

‘Improvisational’ is also being used to describe other AI games. A16Z Games recently did a deep dive into AI companions in their newsletter and highlighted the improvisational possibilities. “There’s perhaps no better example of [improvisation] in action than Suck Up! A game where you’re a vampire trying to trick innocent LLM-powered townsfolk into welcoming you into their homes. The game uses the player’s voice as the input method, and there’s no real guardrails to what you can say. Instead, you’ve just got to make it up as you go along.”

This kind of improvisational gameplay is obviously landing well with gamers. In the indie game Death by AI’s third month, it reached 20 million players with impressive retention metrics and 3 million hours of gameplay. 

Unlike games that leverage generative AI to supplement fixed storylines or add more interactivity to particular game mechanics, AI powers Death by AI’s entire core game loop. The native AI game is driven by an AI Game Master named Bob who gives players a perilous situation to escape from. Players then tell the AI how they plan to escape and the AI judges the player’s fate.

“It’s the fact that the outcomes are so fresh that makes people keep coming back and playing. They don’t expect what’s going to happen,” shared Tabish Ahmed, Playroom’s CEO. See a gameplay demo of Death by AI and case study here. 

That was NVIDIA’s takeaway as well from Covert Protocol, the demo they launched with Inworld this year. “This level of AI-driven interactivity and player agency opens up new possibilities for emergent gameplay," NVIDIA wrote at the time. "Players must think on their feet and adapt their strategies in real-time to navigate the intricacies of the game world."

Virality and the benefits of improvisation

The benefits of improvisational gameplay are both significant and varied. First, games that do innovative things with AI attract the attention of the media and streamers. For example, Bumblebee Studios got over $300,000 and millions of views in free publicity when it launched Vaudeville, a detective game in 2023 and streamers helped it quickly go viral. At the time they launched the game powered by Inworld AI, the studio was just a one-person operation. 

Vaudeville’s popularity with streamers was because its improvisational gameplay allowed players to add their personality to the game and personalize it in ways that weren’t possible before – something that makes for compelling gameplay and streams. 

Games like Death by AI and Suck Up! are other examples of native AI games that have gone viral and attracted millions of gamers due to their innovative and improvisational game loops. 

So, what’s driving that virality? A big part of it is the agency it gives gamers to try new things and get creative in their gameplay in new ways.  “People have been playing video games for a long time and we have established expectations of how video games work,” said Yichao.  “I think my favorite moment is when I watch players play and they go. Wait, can I do X? And they try it and it works.”

Improvisation drives replayability and personalization

The adaptability AI adds means that replaying the game is always different. Next time, they can treat NPCs differently to see how they’ll react or join a different faction to see if NPCs will treat them differently. 

Oliwer Svensson, Antler’s Chief Creative Director, explains how they’ve integrated Inworld’s AI NPCs into their upcoming game Cloudborn’s game dynamics and mechanics. “We’ve focused our AI integrations on creating mechanics that players have to solve,” he explained. “For example, we’ll include an AI NPC as part of the quest. Then, the player might have to convince that NPC to open the doors to the next level. This is where we find the use of AI really interesting because each playthrough will be different.” 

These types of social mechanics add interesting strategy, puzzle solving, and role playing elements to the game – things that RPG fans particularly enjoy. “Players will have to figure out they need to pose certain questions or make friends with NPCs in order to advance,” Oliwer said. “It’s a lot of fun because there's a lot of moments where the AI NPC will surprise you and do something unexpected and you need to adapt to that. It makes you more involved with the game.”
The dialogue also never gets stale. NetEase’s Cygnus Enterprises, for example, is an RPG with base building elements that boasts a companion character whose sarcastic one liners change every time you play and where you can ask her to sing you a song mid-game.

“When you just start the game, PEA warns you that the drop pod is about to explode,” explained Brian Cox, the game’s Lead Programmer, “but you don’t know what she’ll say. She could just tell you to run away or, since she’s very sassy and sarcastic, she might tell you that you should walk away now if you don't want a free tanning session. This makes it fun to replay the game, as the experience will always be different.”

But another big part of the appeal of improvisational gameplay is the new level of personalization that’s achieved with AI. Retail Mage, for example, allows players to include a fun fact when they create their player character – which then comes up throughout the game. “The fun fact that you can eat 30 tacos in one sitting might be something an NPC can relate to you on,” Yichao explains. “Anything that emerges in your background absolutely filters through and influences the gameplay. It gives players the ability to capture their identity or craft a creative character to play – and is a lot of fun.”

That ability to personalize responses to players was also something members of the media that played Covert Protocol commented on repeatedly – especially when improvised aspects of the game became themes or callbacks within the game. Griff Griffin of Sports Illustrated wrote: “What’s incredible is how NPCs reference earlier bits of conversation. For example, when our NVIDIA guy asks what Martin Laine’s like, Tae says he’s a “diva.” Apparently, that’s the first time he’s ever referred to Laine as a diva. I take the mic and ask Tae for some general life tips. ‘My advice? Don’t keep the diva waiting,’ he says, again demonstrating his short-term memory.” 

The benefits of improvisation in games also goes back to other gaming traditions. Many hard-core gamers also love tabletop role playing games and have been dreaming of the day when they can improvise in video games like they can when playing Dungeons and Dragons. And while core game loops that rely on AI-powered improvisation won’t be the right fit for all gamers or in all games, adding some degree of improvisation to games can deliver the same benefits from added personalization, novelty, and agency. 

So, while you might not want to improvise a FPS multiplayer battle, you might want to have special campaigns where players and their AI squadmates can improvise different kinds of novel gameplay. There’s a reason why zombie maps in Call of Duty and Prop Hunt are so popular – gamers love novelty and funny, unpredictable gameplay.  

How to design for improvisation

But perhaps the most important question is how the improvisational aspect AI adds changes game design. It requires that developers design for both NPC and player improvisation. 

To do this, Yichao went back to his roots as a tabletop role playing game player where players don't have to worry about 3D graphics and physics engines. “They can say things like, ‘My barbarian leaps off the table and swings off the chandelier and smashes down into the group of enemies,’” he shared. “Our goal in using AI was to bring that level of improvisational expression and action into the games that we make.”

Constantin similarly saw AI as a tool that allowed him to do more in Cloudborn, while offering more options for gameplay to players: “What AI does for me as a narrative designer is give me superpowers. I feel like I have so many more places to go, so many more things to explore,” he shared. “That makes me more of a producer maybe, than a classic narrative designer.” 

What Jam and Tea were trying to do with Retail Mage was find a way to make anything seem possible in their game world while still creating a compelling narrative and game loop. “The possibilities that the technology unlocks are wide open. But how can we be responsive to what the player is doing, allow them to change the world, and still deliver a satisfying ending at the end of each experience?” he asked. 

That’s something that Virginie Mosser, the Narrative Director on Ubisoft’s NEO NPC project agrees with. “When the player creates their own scene and it all clicks? That’s an incredible experience for them,” she said in a Ubisoft blog post. “[But] it’s important to us to reiterate that these characters do not have free will. They are there to play a role in a story. They have a narrative arc.”

Creating that narrative arc is a challenge that’s the similar to the difference between good improv and bad improv. You might be able to make up anything in improv but if it doesn't lead to anything that’s not serving the audience. Creating guardrails might seem complicated given the unbounded nature of generative AI, but it just requires more advanced planning.“You have to design something that clearly lives within a world, has thematic elements that you want players to experience, and has some arc of a plot that you want them to discover and that can move forward and progress – while also giving the player a lot of room to change where that goes and to change how that happens,” he explained. 

The key takeaway for developers is that good improvisational game design requires that they attend to the structures and possibilities rather than think about branching narratives and action. Then, choose to either tie the improvised actions back to an existing narrative arc or allow the game to follow the new narrative arc to reach a satisfying and coherent ending. 

The future of improvisational gameplay

Ultimately, this is just the beginning of what’s possible for improvisational gameplay when leveraging AI in games. While AI has proven a great fit for the party games, RPGs, and simulation games covered in this post, in the future, expect more game genres to find ways to add improvisational gameplay in fun ways that engage players and go viral.  

Our Future of Game Development with AI NPCs report found that Sandbox/Simulation, RPGs, Shooters, Open World, and Action Adventure games were the genres most likely to incorporate AI NPCs in the future and that 54% of game devs believe their studios will add AI NPCs into their games in the coming years. 

Learn more about how to incorporate AI into different genres of games or character archetypes here. Or reach out to learn more!