Hey, heroes! WanderingStar reporting for this dev log. For those of you who don’t know me, I joined the Latitude team last summer in the role of lead narrative designer.
It's been a while since that last dev log–but take it as a good sign. It means we've been busy forging something special: Wayfarer, our new AI model that we've whipped and goaded into being... well, worse at being nice. While the rest of the world scrambles to make AI safer and more helpful, we've been locked away in our underground labs training ours in the dark arts of murder. It knows about a thousand different ways to kill you. All for funsies, of course—Terminators not included. If you've been playing AID lately, you already know how harshly entertaining Wayfarer can be. We've even unleashed it into the wild, open-sourcing our creation for all to "enjoy." We're confident that someday soon—when people realize that safe AI makes for deadly dull stories—the world will thank us.
But why start a Heroes dev log with talk about an AI Dungeon finetune? Stick around and find out!
Catching Up
First, some news. A lot has happened in the past six months. Too much to report in one short log. For one thing, we've got some new blood: several new members have recently joined the Heroes team as we accelerate development. One of them is yours truly, focused on narrative design–making Heroes stories more engaging. Other new additions to the team include a UI/UX designer, a senior frontend engineer, a systems game designer and an AI researcher. We're all really excited about what each of us can contribute to the development process over the next few months.
New Perspectives
With new team members come new perspectives. As the narrative designer, one of the first things I noticed was how our AI seemed averse to conflict. Every scene felt like it was written by an overprotective parent determined to shield their children from even the mildest distress. In an era obsessed with AI safety, we'd somehow created a game that was too safe. And, despite all the focus on making AI safe right now, in games safety isn't fun. In Heroes, a lot of our earlier prototypes were like that DM who can't bear to hurt their players' characters. Every quest wrapped up neatly. Every wound healed quickly. Every conflict resolved peacefully, before it could even begin.
It made for completely bloodless and utterly boring storytelling.
A Nice Story
Let me give you an example. In the world I'm working on, young people from a certain city have to complete an ordeal when they come of age: go out into the wilderness, at night, and hunt a dangerous monster. This is supposed to be a harrowing experience. Not everyone returns, and those that do tell horror stories of what they had to endure to survive.
When I tried it, in the old version, it usually played more like a feel-good story about a camping trip. Catch a rabbit for dinner, build a nice fire to cook it over. Pass the wineskin around as the stars come out. Monsters, you say? What monsters?
It went on like that forever. Just the nicest, safest, coziest fantasy camping trip you could imagine. Now, some of that sort of thing is fine. But a whole game and story about it?
Radical Surgery
So we performed some radical surgery. First, we did an AI brain transplant, changing underlying AI models. Then, we gave the game a new nervous system, with completely new instructions about how to write better. Next, we ripped out the quest system to make room for a whole new narrative skeleton. It was a big set of changes. No more fetching MacGuffins, no more signs pointing towards adventure, no more AI-generated hoops to jump through for XP. No more plans for what should happen next or suggested actions for you to take. Just you, in a harsh world, with your wits and your resolve, trying to survive.
After these changes, I tried the ordeal set-up again and–well, I think I made it about six actions before dying a gloriously horrible death. I was delighted. Instead of sitting around the campfire chatting as I waited for the monsters to come, I was flung into a deadly pursuit or bloody battle, every turn one wrong move or bad roll from another death. That night, I bit the dust a dozen times, and every time another monster tore me apart or lopped off my head, my smile only widened. It was fun!
A Not-So-Nice Story
Soon, we were all swapping tales of our characters' grisly deaths. But it wasn't all blood and gore–that, too, would be tedious. Instead, from the chaos and strife, stories sprang up.
Here’s one that a player described as “one of the most natural instances of story progression I've ever seen” and “so natural it almost seemed scripted”:
In a spacefaring setting, a smuggler set off in his spaceship on what was supposed to be a routine cargo run. While en route, he learned he’d been duped into transporting a dangerous item—something so powerful that it could decide a conflict between warring galactic civilizations. Through all this, one of his crew members seemed suspiciously interested in this item, so he confronted her.
After a tense interrogation, she revealed herself to be a shapeshifter who had infiltrated his crew in a bid to acquire the item for her people. When she offered him a fortune to help her smuggle the item through enemy lines, he accepted. But, on their way to rendezvous with her allies, they were ambushed by hostile vessels, which launched a devastating attack that crippled their ship.
Boarding an escape pod, they crash-landed at a remote, abandoned outpost. There they found a series of strange dimensional anomalies created by the outpost’s former owners—and a hostile robot security force bent on annihilating them.
Cornered, his ammo depleted, our smuggler was forced to grapple hand to hand with one of the last robots standing. When he became entangled with his adversary, he decided his best hope was to drag his foe into the nearest dimensional rift. He succeeded, sending the robot to its doom in the anomaly, but was sucked in after it.
Trapped within, his only way to escape was to evolve: in the struggle, his character gained new powers over the very fabric of spacetime. Using these newfound abilities, he was able to make his way back to root reality. But the powers he’d gained in the anomaly would have far-reaching consequences no one could have anticipated.
Didn’t See That Coming
And that’s the fascinating thing about all this: no one could have anticipated any of it, because it actually wasn’t scripted in any way. Instead, it’s what we call an emergent narrative: a story that arises spontaneously from interplay between the game’s various narrative systems—and the player. These systems work together to create an environment where compelling stories are bound to emerge, whatever the player decides to do. Since they don’t rely on artificial quest structures or forced plotting, the stories they drive feel natural in a way that most interactive fiction doesn’t. The result is total freedom for players to be and do whatever they want—while still experiencing a narrative that seems like it was written just for them.
"I could see myself playing this character alone for thousands of actions," another player noted after testing these changes. "There's no grand plot I'm supposed to follow. I'm just a character in a harsh world who has to make my own way in it, try to survive and make something of it. I'm not a hero unless I make myself one."
That's exactly what we're aiming for. Not a guided tour through a carefully curated adventure, but an open-ended struggle where your choices–and their consequences–actually matter.
This philosophy–that meaningful stories require real choices and genuine conflict–drove both our Wayfarer development and our Heroes redesign. By training our AI on carefully created data rich in adversity, loss, and consequence, we've created something that better understands the essential role of conflict in narrative. Not gratuitous violence or meaningless death, but the kind of genuine stakes that make victory taste sweeter and defeat sting deeper.
More updates coming soon (really!). Stay dangerous out there–you're going to need those survival skills for what we're cooking up next….
—WanderingStar
