AI Town v2
There has been a lot changing with AI Town - here’s an overdue update to catch you up.
Background: After launching https://convex.dev/ai-town mere weeks ago as an experiment, we were surprised at how much attention the project gained (over 5k stars on GitHub!). Interest grew in developing it further: for games, personal experimentation, and more. Some of you likely ran across notable clones of it, like AI Silicon Valley, Cat Town, or my personal favorite: Zaranova. We’ve been hard at work improving it since then. Let’s look at some recent changes, and what it means for anyone interested in extending the platform. As a reminder, the repo is open-source, and can be found here:
Interactive
You can now walk around and interact with the AI citizens! Click to walk around, invite or be invited to chat with nearby citizens. We’ve had some fun internally spreading rumors amongst the citizens and seeing that spread and show up in later conversations with other people.
Extensible game mechanics
We overhauled the serverless game engine to make it easier to extend. Be on the lookout for an upcoming Stack post on how I added activities, if you’re wanting to add more gameplay elements. Some exciting ones proposed by the community: let the citizens message on Discord or SMS, interact with objects and their environment 🔥, or even trade stonks 💹.
Easy to mod
Don’t want to code, but want your own AI ant farm, Matrix, or USS Callister?
Edit the name, identity, and other attributes of an agent (NPC) in the character data before creating your world, or in your Dashboard in the agents table once it’s live. Their conversations will immediately start to reflect their new identities. To save this data, you can download a table snapshot from settings, and copy the identities into the seed data later when you want to recreate the world.
There’s also a map editor to make your own levels, with some community members using AI to make the map assets and character sprites. What a time to be alive!
Want to contribute? Join this Issue to make agent data easier to sync and share.
Join the party
Bring your wild ideas and busted worlds. The AI Town Discord is in #ai-town-dev in the AI Stack Devs here. Come chat about Convex, the backend for AI Town, in our community Discord here. You can find the open source repo here:
🤫 Keep your eyes out for an upcoming competition for best AI Town clone. May the best civilization win!
Convex is the sync platform with everything you need to build your full-stack project. Cloud functions, a database, file storage, scheduling, search, and realtime updates fit together seamlessly.