Empowering Developers with the Latest Behavior Engine Updates
Making games is hard.
Compelling narrative content and dynamic encounters are taxing on the production pipeline. When teams are lacking bandwidth and facing immovable deadlines, practicality takes over. Iteration gets compressed, the bar starts to slip, and some of the studio’s strongest ideas get cut, not because they were bad, but because there wasn’t enough time to finish them properly.
That’s why last summer, Artificial Agency privately launched our behavior engine, which can embed runtime decision-making directly into game mechanics—turning any game system into a living agent that is responsive to the world, players, and unfolding story around it. This introduced the possibility for entirely new player experiences and began to transform how games are designed—empowering developers to experiment with new scenarios and levels of complexity with unprecedented ease and speed.
From the very beginning, it’s been important to us to create technology that developers can actually use right out of the box. We’ve continued to evolve the engine over the last year, and are excited to announce a few updates today that help developers expand their creativity and bring their great ideas to life.
Characters with Memories
Last year, we introduced our Character agent archetype: fully autonomous, embodied beings that can express emotion and react dynamically to complex scenarios. Developers define their roles, perception and behavior, and the character makes the game experience feel more alive.
However, we knew that for these characters to serve as true companions, they needed to remember everything the character and the player had done together throughout the game. After all, games are not (typically) consumed in one session. We put the game down and come back, over and over again. Developers need assurance that traditional game mechanics will function correctly without a character being frozen in a particular state. Our agents needed to have memories.
The behavior engine now ensures that traditional load/save functionality works while also offering additional features such as characters responding to the player's absence. This enhancement will make games feel even more dynamic—for example, a player can return to find that an NPC has progressed in their own task—while also allowing developers to explore new possibilities and create new types of stories.
Multiplayer Compatibility
There’s almost nothing better than playing a game with a friend, but multiplayer development is one of the most technically challenging aspects of game design. Developers need to navigate the constant friction of latency and ensure that, despite lag, every player sees or interacts with the same thing at the same time.
Our behavior engine is now fully compatible with multiplayer environments. Take an NPC that’s been brought to life with our Character archetype: every individual player will be able to interact with it simultaneously, essentially turning the character into a new, dynamic member of the party. Likewise, a developer could deploy our Game Director agent archetype, in which non-embodied beings can observe the player’s progress and manage the overall story, to take on the role of a “Commander” that provides strategic advice for a multiplayer team and adapts to the group’s collective play style.
Latent Functions
Most agentic frameworks are sequential: do one thing, then the next. In a living world, that gets clunky fast.
Latent functions let behavior unfold over time. They can run in parallel, report progress, and be interrupted or resumed as conditions change. This is the execution layer behind more capable agentic workflows.
Instead of stitching together brittle scripts, developers can build agents that stay responsive in motion. An NPC can move to cover while reloading and calling for backup, then interrupt that sequence when something unexpected happens and continue when it makes sense.
That gives characters a more natural ability to handle the messiness of real gameplay.
Coaching Feature
Every developer knows the struggle of trying to anticipate every possible scenario in which a player might get stuck, and create the right cues and prompts to guide them. Developers want players to feel guided, not insulted. Challenged, not overwhelmed.
Our new Coaching feature replaces those clunky tutorials with an intelligent agent that observes player intent and acts accordingly. By using guardrails, developers can restrict the agent’s capabilities to ensure it nudges players in the right direction in an organic way rather than handicapping the player experience or creating annoying interjections.
First Class Unity Support
We believe this technology can’t truly be transformative until it’s widely accessible. That’s why we have created our Unity plugin, bringing our tools to one of the world’s most widely used game engines. Our integration ensures developers can add generative behavior to their characters without overhauling their existing workflows. And for those building on proprietary platforms or engines outside Unity and Unreal, our API provides access to any game engine.
Level Two:
We know that designing a game can feel like a constant battle between big ambitions and the day-to-day realities of time, technical, and resource limitations. Despite the excitement and love of the craft, it can feel like a slog. We believe generative behavior is the key to easing these pressures and bringing more fun into game design.
Our new features are just a start—we will continue to build and evolve our engine to meet what developers need most.
If you’re interested in joining us, we’re hiring.
If you’re interested in developing better games, we’d love to hear from you.
