Unreal Playground: Goals & Mutations demo

Our Unreal Playground Demo is one of the key ways we help you get started with the Inworld SDK for Unreal Engine. It’s designed as a frequently updated demo project that demonstrates new Inworld features as we release them. The Unity Playground Demo is also available. 

In this blog post, we'll highlight the newest Inworld AI Unreal Playground demos:

• Enabling and disabling Goals with intent recognition
• Dynamic data retrieval
• Character Core Description and Motivation Mutations

Learn the fundamentals of how to use Inworld’s Goals and our Mutations feature within Unreal to:

• Interact with characters based on your game’s current state and environment
• Provide up-to-date knowledge from external sources to your character
• Mutate almost every aspect of your character in real time

Enabling and disabling Goals with intent recognition

Inworld introduces an innovative way to manage AI characters by allowing you to enable and disable Goals you create in Inworld Studio. This allows you to synchronize game state with the Character Brain and create custom interactions based on what’s happening in your game.

In our demo, the character will move left or right after the player says hello, showcasing how specific intents can be used to enable possible interactions. Each time you ask our character to move left or right, a Goal is both enabled and disabled, setting up a specific game state.

Read more about Goals in our Docs. 

Dynamic Data Retrieval with entities and parameters

This demo showcases the ability to use our Goals feature to allow an Inworld AI character to fetch data. In this example, the character is interacting with an external API and fetching real-world data. The player asks the character to fetch the population of a city which triggers the Unreal integration to perform an HTTP Get request to an external API and provide that information back to the character to relay to the player. 

This real-time data retrieval adds a layer of realism and immersion, as characters can provide current, relevant information based on player queries. Our example uses an external API but characters can be given relevant data from anywhere, including your games’ current state or an internal database. Accessing data from external sources could be particularly helpful in simulation or educational games where the ability to retrieve up-to-date information would be helpful. However, you could also use this to retrieve information from the environment or game state in any type of game. For example, you could use it to ensure players know what kind of weapon another NPC is using, if they’re asked. The ability to integrate external data sources seamlessly with in-game characters is a significant step forward in creating intelligent, responsive game worlds.

Read more about Goals in our Docs.

Core Description and Motivation Mutations

This demo showcases the ability to mutate a character's core description and motivation based on in-game events and shows how characters can adapt and evolve, reflecting changes in the game environment or player interactions. 

In this example, the character’s favorite food is changed using a parameter in a trigger sent by Unreal. The favorite food parameter is fed into a goal which mutates the character who once liked chocolate and was motivated to tell you all about chocolate, to now like pizza and tell you about pizza instead.

This capability introduces a new dimension to character development in games, enabling characters to grow and change in response to the player's actions – and making it easier for developers to create AI characters that evolve throughout the entire game. Character Mutations is an exciting feature that offers the ability to create more dynamic and responsive characters.  We are just scratching the surface by showing how it could be used for Core Description and Motivations mutations but you could choose to mutate common knowledge shared amongst all characters in a scene or practically anything you can find in the Inworld Studio.

Read more about Mutations in our Docs.

Bottom line

Our newest version of Goals combined with data retrieval and Character Mutations introduce groundbreaking new ways to use Inworld AI NPC Characters in your games. Learning the fundamentals will help you better understand how you can combine all these features to create truly innovative NPC driven games. 

Check out the Unreal Playground Demo today and be sure to sign up for our Discord if you have questions about using Inworld in Unreal.