AI company teams with Unity to launch “sample” cyberpunk game with generated dialogue, behaviors

Unity and Convai, a company which provides generative conversation AI software, will release Project Neural Nexus, a demo game which showcases Convai's “smart” NPCs and Unity's Muse Behavior tool, later this year.

Here's how Convai describes the game on its website: “Step into the world of Neo City, a cyberpunk theme city where danger lurks at every corner. You wake up at a hotel and are being chased by the police and killer robots. Your objective is to make out of the hotel filled with assassins – alive. But you are not alone. You have help from your AI companion, who can equip you with weapons, teach you how to shoot, guide you at every step and is helping you get out of the hotel.

“Your decisions change the storyline but be careful, one wrong step and it's game over. The game is powered by Convai's smart NPCs where you can have open-ended conversations, make decisions, perform actions, interact with various environmental objects, and are guided by an AI companion. Welcome to Neo City. Your survival story begins now.”

Convai has also released a trailer of the demo, where you can see the AI ​​NPCs in action. Voices sound very flat, some of the animations look a little janky, and the music sounds rather similar to something from Cyberpunk 2077's soundtrack. (I also can't be the only one who hears Todd Howard's voice in that robot which talks about Yggdrasil, right?)

(Coincidentally, Convai has documentation on how to integrate Convai with Cyberpunk 2077 through modding. It seems to be missing a video link for the guide, but even without that it's fairly easy to imagine where inspiration for Project Neural Nexus was taken from.)

Convai's provided the conversation AI which generates real-time dialogue between NPCs and responses to player speech. The company partnered with Unity to use its Muse AI tools, in particular Behavior (currently a pre-release feature), which automatically creates dynamic character interactions. The game's creative director is Sakura Rabbitan indie Unity developer.

Convai is planning on shipping its “sample” game later this year, founder Purnendu Mukherjee said in a video update on the company, but sign ups for early access are currently open.

The announcement of Project Neural Nexus lines up with Unity's own report on AI, which found 62 percent of studies use AI at some point during game development. Unity announced Muse at the end of last year, and has been slowly rolling out its “responsibly sourced AI tools” to its developers ever since.