InworldAI · 2023
InworldAI
AI Character Tools for Game Developers
- Duration
- 6 months
- Role
- Lead Product Designer
- Team
- Product Design, Engineering, AI Research
- Tags
- AI, Product Design, Gaming, Xbox, Generative AI
Product design for InworldAI, a platform for building AI-powered characters for games. The work focused on developer-facing tooling, centered on the Narrative Graph, a visual interface for authoring character behavior, and included a co-development collaboration with Xbox that produced a reference integration for major game studios.
Overview
InworldAI is a platform for building AI-powered characters and narratives for games and interactive experiences. It sits at the intersection of generative AI, game development, and storytelling — letting developers create characters that respond dynamically to player input without scripted dialogue trees.
My work focused on the developer-facing tooling: the interfaces through which game studios configure, test, and deploy AI characters into their games.
The Design Challenge
The primary users are game developers and narrative designers — technically sophisticated, but not AI researchers. The tools needed to abstract the complexity of large-language-model configuration while exposing enough control for professional-grade character creation.
- Make AI behavior feel predictable and testable — designers need to know what they'll get before shipping
- Support non-linear narrative structures — branching dialogue, emotional states, memory
- Enable iteration speed — keep the gap between "I have an idea" and "I can test it" as short as possible
The Narrative Graph
The centerpiece of the InworldAI toolset is the Narrative Graph — a visual interface for structuring AI character behavior, dialogue flows, and emotional state transitions.
The Narrative Graph. A visual canvas for authoring AI character behavior — dialogue flows, branching paths, and emotional state transitions, all editable without code.
Outcome
The Narrative Graph became the signature feature of InworldAI's platform, and the Xbox collaboration produced a reference integration that expanded InworldAI's reach into major game studios.