GDC 2025 | Bringing AI NPCs to Life On-Device With NVIDIA ACE Small Language Models in Dead Meat
12Watch a replay of our GDC 2025 Session, presented by Meaning Machine.
Dead Meat is a murder mystery game that features freeform conversations with AI-powered NPC “suspects”. The experience lives and dies by the depth of its characters, with players delving into the psychology of the suspects to understand ‘why they did it’. Historically, these characters required the power of LLMs in the cloud, but cloud-based LLMs are challenging for runtime games due to 3rd party costs and online dependency. By working with NVIDIA, Meaning Machine were able to bring Dead Meat’s complex characters “on device”. This involved fine-tuning a Minitron SLM, and integrating NVIDIA ACE with their own Game Conscious™ AI system. The on-device version of Dead Meat delivers the same character depth achieved in the cloud, but now it’s being done locally, on a consumer-grade GPU.
This talk from GDC 2025 breaks down how this was accomplished and offers valuable insight to game developers who want to run their AI game locally – with a particular focus on deep and meaningful NPCs.
See NVIDIA's announcements at GDC 2025:https://www.nvidia.com/en-us/events/gdc//
Meaning Machine:https://www.meaningmachine.games//
Learn more about NVIDIA ACE:https://developer.nvidia.com/ace//
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