The Today company, headquartered in Lisbon, Portugal, has officially released Dreamia, an AI-driven character engine with the ability to dynamically shape storylines in real time.

Today has been dedicated to developing the next generation of immersive social simulation games, allowing players to cultivate vibrant virtual island communities. Dreamia represents their most innovative product release to date.

In order to achieve a more dynamic, responsive, and creative social simulation experience, Today successfully raised $5 million earlier this year from Sfermion and Big Brain. Their team consists of seasoned game development experts from industry leaders such as Nintendo, SEGA, Epic Games, and Unity.

As Today's next-generation character engine, Dreamia utilizes artificial intelligence to create intelligent and highly interactive non-player characters (NPCs). These NPCs not only behave realistically but also dynamically respond to player actions. With player involvement, their actions shape the story development, making every encounter in Today's world smooth, engaging, and highly personalized. Today states that this design ensures that each player receives a unique gaming experience, enhancing the realism, complexity, and appeal of the game.

Even in today's world where AI companions and chatbots are becoming increasingly popular, Dreamia stands out with its unique custom engine. This engine successfully integrates principles of film storytelling, such as character development, story structure, subtext, and complex interpersonal relationships, into the game. Co-founder Michael O'Connor emphasized in a statement, "We developed Dreamia internally, effectively building the gameplay of the next generation. Our unique story-first approach sets Dreamia apart: we are incorporating the subtleties of real life into NPCs, giving them emotional depth, situational awareness, and responsiveness."

O'Connor further stated that Dreamia not only makes the game more enjoyable but also empowers players with more agency and influence. Players become active participants, shaping their own narrative journeys and contributing creativity to their gaming experiences.

The Today team consists of a group of data scientists and AI engineers with doctoral degrees. They have fine-tuned open-source LLM (Large Language Model) to enhance its specific functionalities in Dreamia. By employing a hybrid model that utilizes both local and cloud-based LLM, this approach improves performance while reducing server costs, maintaining high-quality text and voice generation.

Dreamia's core features include:

• Deep personalities: Dreamia's core lies in its sophisticated AI system, enabling NPCs to exhibit realistic behaviors and interactions. These NPCs engage in in-depth conversations, dynamically understanding and adapting to player actions, creating a dynamic and captivating gaming experience.

• Situational awareness: Unlike traditional NPCs, Dreamia's NPCs can perceive changes in the game environment and respond appropriately to new situations. By providing context-relevant responses, NPCs create a more realistic and immersive gaming experience for players.

• Continual memory: Every action a player takes in the game becomes a unique memory for Dreamia. Whether it's past conversations or recent activities, Dreamia remembers and reacts to recent behavior. This allows each player to have their own unique world within Today. This design creates an evolving narrative experience, making interactions meaningful and accumulating over time.

• Emotional intelligence: NPCs powered by Dreamia can detect and respond to player's emotional states, providing empathetic and appropriate reactions. This adds authenticity and emotional resonance to interactions in the game.

• Procedural animation: Dreamia utilizes emotional data embedded in dialogues to trigger real-time animations. This creates dynamic and contextualized physical reactions, making interactions feel natural and expressive through body language and facial expressions.

The company emphasizes that as Today's narrative core, Dreamia's creation of emotional energy gives the virtual world a human touch, allowing players to comfortably immerse themselves in a vibrant virtual world shared with others. Ben Cleary, Oscar-winning screenwriter and director, as well as Today's Creative Director, stated in a declaration that he deeply understands the importance of storytelling to humanity.

"Since childhood, I've been designing scrolls and stories on my bedroom wall, dreaming of exploring those intricate worlds and narratives firsthand. My early passion for video games, books, and movies shaped my love for multidimensional storytelling experiences that combine visuals, interactivity, and emotional depth," Cleary said. "I know that storytelling is not just about telling a story; it's about resonating with the audience and creating a lasting emotional impact. As games become more cinematic, these narrative foundations are key differentiating factors in achieving large-scale interactive storytelling."

Later this year, players, developers, and other stakeholders will be able to create their own characters through Dreamia. They will use a visual frontend accessible within the game and on the web, further enhancing Today's procedural creation tools. Based on proprietary LLM analysis and translation inputs, this tool can dynamically generate architecture and interior designs. Players can then adjust these creations using in-game modules, achieving direct control and ownership of their creations.

Today plans to launch an alpha version early next year and conduct the next major playtesting phase in mid-summer.

The company has currently raised $5 million in funding and has a team of 39 employees. While there are other NPC solutions on the market, Today responded, "When third-party APIs are attached to games, NPC interactions often lack seamless integration. By using an in-house AI engine, we can directly influence the gameplay of the entire world, thus enabling more possibilities."

O'Connor from Today also stated, "With the development of Today, Dreamia was created out of practical necessity. It's what our game needed, so we chose to develop it internally to provide a more nuanced and responsive experience than third-party solutions. With just one line of code, we can update the context of characters, such as making them aware of the existence of a new building. In contrast, most existing solutions require defining an event for the building, calling that event, and then waiting for the character to become aware of it. The streamlined process in Dreamia makes it more efficient and responsive, speeding up game development and providing a better experience for players."

He further added, "For example, in our game, residents have various needs that players need to pay attention to. Players interact with residents to understand how to help them, such as assisting them in choosing fashionable outfits. When players change a resident's clothing, NPCs immediately recognize these changes and express their comments and opinions. They may prefer a certain outfit, have a preference for specific sneakers, or have preferences for colors, patterns, etc. This level of situational awareness and contextual responsiveness allows players to interactively shape their world, making NPCs feel more realistic and engaging."

O'Connor also mentioned, "Dreamia's advanced situational awareness capabilities make NPCs active participants in the game world, rather than just passive chatbots. They express their preferences, adapt to changes, and provide feedback, making interactions more meaningful and engaging. This strengthens the connection between players and NPC residents, as NPCs are not just part of the game environment but an integral part of the player's experience, setting Dreamia apart in the competition."

Dreamia offers a new generation of player-NPC relationships for storytelling experiences. Existing NPC solutions often appear rigid, shallow, and inflexible. It is challenging to translate the openness of human conversations into other NPC abilities, such as emotional reasoning, social responsiveness, long-term memory, and spatial awareness. Dreamia aims to make NPCs aware of the game, the player, and their own existence.

NPCs dynamically adapt to changes in the game environment and respond appropriately to player actions and environmental factors. This creates a believable game world where NPC dialogues and behaviors consistently reflect the state of the game, providing players with a more immersive, interactive, and enjoyable gaming experience.