Originally published on my Patreon here
Nyric is an upcoming game (on Steam here, watch the trailer above) that blends sandbox/virtual world creativity, survival/crafting gameplay, and generative AI in an ambitiously fresh way -- so much so, it's almost a new subgenre. ("Minecraft meets Midjourney" might be a fair elevator pitch.) Kayla Comalli, CEO/co-founder of Nyric developer Lovelace Studio, also counts Second Life as an inspiration to Nyric. "We aspire to that level of emergent chaos," as she puts it.
Amid the bubbly hype of gen AI lately, you might have noticed any number of "create your own virtual world with a prompt!" projects, but Nyric takes a decidedly different approach.
"[T]he permutation within each world adds interactive depth to gameplay," Kayla explains. "It’s not just a stylistic sandbox. When players ‘dream up’ their realm (similar to prompting an image in Midjourney), they generate an interactive 3D survival-craft realm with multiple biomes."
This process basically lets players modify the procedural generation of their world:
"A broad series of world parameters means realm diversity is effectively infinite; the sky, weather, topography, and environmental hazards are considered during generation. In this way, you might create underwater ruins filled with caustic acid bubbles or a giant mushroom valley under an eternal night sky, where you must pioneer a lantern-lit path to your base."
When this world is prompted, it also spawns an AI companion, called a faebot.
"Each faebot has a broad set of personality traits that are involved in gameplay progression, as well as abilities that power player exploration. They remember events (dialogues, places, actions, etc.) and can diegetically resurface those stories for ever-shifting gameplay. "
It's also a multi-user virtual world -- or rather, an interlocking series of player-created virtual worlds:
"Each realm spawns as a hexagon within an interconnected graph. Players are incentivized to create resource routes to each of their realm’s edges and become super connectors. As a digital geography, this allows for organic discovery and complex social dynamics. Because the realm emulates a social network, early adopters gain higher exposure and influence."
The multi-user aspect is integral to Nyric's meta game, which they informally call “pioneercraft”.
"It’s a persistent social platform. You can explore player worlds asynchronously, discover their history by talking to their fae, or exploring their kingdoms. You can leverage diplomacy, and/or use your realms influence to create strategic trade routes. At the micro scale, you can build out subcommunities to operate local tribes. At the macro scale those tribes can expand into global factions which have influence on the meta gameplay of the entire multiverse."
So yes, Nyric is ambitious. And its gen AI prompting aspect does not replace player's ability to create together in-world by "hand", but rather, enhances human-driven creativity:
Kayla Comalli creating
"It's only the stylistic realms, unique character personas, and metadata that is generated from the prompt (and we'll expose more atomic elements to this to players over time to further customize it)," Kayla explains. "The realms resources are used by players for building, using similar crafting mechanics as Valheim, to build up their kingdoms. " (Here's some gameplay video with 3D building.)
In other worlds, the text prompting in Nyric creates the visual thematics and 3D palette for a given realm, but it's still up to the player to customize the fine details by hand. In fact, player creativity is necessary to increase a realm's resources and to produce special districts.
"So it's kind of a two-pronged incentive for players to venture out to the edges of realms: to see different stylistic worlds, and to see what is built out in those spaces."
I haven't played Nyric yet, but its approach to generative AI is refreshing, and worth cheering for. All too many AI enthusiasts discount player creativity, missing the entire point of virtual worlds in the process. My hope is Nyric can become a model for a better way of bringing AI and human agency together.
Speaking of which, Kayla tells me they'll be releasing Steam codes to Nyric soon -- go here to get on the list.
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