Blood & Laurels is covered in the July 7 edition of The New York Times (page C1 in the print edition): What Blood & Laurels offers is one of those quintessential video game moments, a first glimpse at something on the horizon. The coverage is part of a larger article about developments in IF, which also mentions the growth of Twine, work by Porpentine, Christine Love, and Cara Ellison, and other text-based apps such as Device 6 and A Dark Room.

Richard Evans will be speaking about AI research and game AI — including some thoughts based on his work on Versu — at Develop. Develop runs July 8-10, 2014 in Brighton. Here’s the talk description: Why are some AI researchers sniffy about so-called Game AI? Why are some game developers unimpressed by AI research? Why can’t everybody just “chillax” and get along? More seriously, this talk is about what game developers can learn from AI research. It will describe various recherché (i.e. fancy-pants) techniques that could be used in next-gen games.

Versu is under new development, and we are publishing fresh stories, starting with Blood & Laurels on June 12. Until February of this year, the Versu project had its home at Linden Lab, exploring the possibilities of interactive storytelling with advanced character AI by Richard Evans (Sims 3, Black and White) and dialogue modeling by Emily Short (Galatea, Alabaster), as well as work by authors Jake Forbes (Return to Labyrinth) and Deirdra Kiai (Dominique Pamplemousse). Regency-era comedy of manners and a modern office comedy stories, released for Versu, had received significant attention… Read More

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