A note about the AI Director - What it is and how it works

Coming to tell you a little bit more about something that might cause some confusion, so I want to be very clear about it!

One of the systems we are very excited about in A Tale of Silent Depths is our AI Director. A few streamers asked about it, so it's important to note how it works!

This is not generative AI creating content or replacing human work. In games, an AI Director is a gameplay system used to control pacing, pressure, and encounters. A well-known example is Left 4 Dead, where the Director helped decide when to increase tension, when to give players room to breathe, and what kinds of threats should appear. It's a theme which I did my graduation conclusion work about 6 years ago, specially around the theme of Dynamic Difficulty Adjustment (DDA).

AI Directors have been around for decades, the single novelty thing is that I added a very small, very simple offline and local LLM on it. It generates no narrative, no text, no art, nothing: every art and narrative of the game was made by the awesome people who worked on this game.

Our goal with this system is to make the Ocean feel more alive and less predictable.

Instead of every run simply following a fixed list of encounters, the AI Director helps select which threats are thrown at the player depending on the state of the journey. Sometimes the Ocean may give you a moment of silence. Sometimes it may decide that silence has lasted long enough.

We also love the way games like RimWorld use systems to create dynamic stories through events, threats, and pressure. That is the spirit we are aiming for here: not just random danger, but a more dynamic selection of dangers that can create memorable moments, unexpected problems, and stories that feel like they happened to your Ark.

Still, if you want to tune down the AI Director to a more traditional "algorithmic heuristics driven" approach, you can just check a box in the settings menu. Whatever works best for you! I want you to have fun above everything :)

And to be completely transparent and to end this notice with something of importance: over a 20 people worked on this project across it's history. Even with the coming of gen-AI across the Industry, I would NEVER replace a single of them with it, and I want this to be very clear.

This game could not be made possible without those people! They are amazing, and I recommend checking the credits and each of their socials if you have the opportunity.

Cheers!

-Eduardo