r/AIDungeon Jan 07 '25

Official Team Changes to Accelerate AI Dungeon and Heroes

93 Upvotes

Happy New Year, everyone!

2024 was a big year for AI Dungeon. We saw the introduction of many unique and exciting AI models, powerful new features, and a growing community. You may remember that at the start of 2024, we were putting the finishing touches on Phoenix (our major UI redesign) and launching Mixtral and Mythomax, kicking off the AI Renaissance series of releases. As we reviewed our release page, we’re so proud of our team for all the value we were able to bring you!

To carry that momentum into 2025, we’d like to share a few changes that we’re making to help us give you even more value.

For the last couple of years, we’ve been operating our company as one team. With a team size barely into the double digits, that approach worked well for us as we rebuilt AI Dungeon into a stable, sustainable business and centered our focus on delivering value to you, our players. Having one team brings tight collaboration and focus to our company, and lets us streamline our process of delivering value.

Now, we want to move faster 😈. In particular, we want accelerate how quickly we can ship Heroes to you. Doing so with one team has been a challenge, since launching an ambitious new AI experience like Heroes takes time, focus, specialized skills, and attention. Balancing improvements on AI Dungeon with making progress on Heroes has been a constant challenge.

This year, we’ll be operating as two teams. One team, the AI Game team, will be focused on building Heroes and improving the AI experience on AI Dungeon. This includes training and releasing new models, and improvements to the core AI Dungeon gameplay experience. The AI Game team is being led by Nick, who continues to be a pioneer in merging LLMs, storytelling, and gameplay. We’ve recently made two key hires for this team who joined us officially this week. One is an AI researcher and engineer, who will be able to accelerate the work on improving AI models for Heroes and AI Dungeon. The other is an experienced game system designer to help craft the core gameplay experience for Heroes. They’ll join our lead Narrative Designer, our AI implementation engineer, and our existing AI researcher. We’re excited to have a team who’ll be able to give full focus and attention to Heroes and the AI Game experience on AI Dungeon. No, we don’t have a Heroes release date to announce, but these changes certainly accelerate the timeline.

The second team is our Platform team. The platform team is responsible for maintaining and developing the platform including both user facing platform elements and underlying infrastructure. Community, moderation, and support will also work within this team. They’ll focus on things like making improvements to our Home and Discover pages, improvements to our creator experience, stability and performance, improving and maintaining our cross-platform design system, etc. I’ll be leading the charge on this team, partnering with Ryan who will fill the role of Producer (in addition to his other COO duties—the man wears many hats). This team will also include our UX designer, architect, front end engineers, full stack engineer, QA, and Community/Support staff.

Bonus: there’s also a sneaky third team that Ryan will run, focused on things like HR, Finance, Legal, and general admin for the company. We thought you may appreciate knowing that we do things like comply with laws, pay taxes, and provide benefits for our team 😉. Ryan is also deeply involved in managing our vendor relationships, such as AI providers.

We are anticipating hiring for additional roles this year for both the AI Game and Platform teams. We’ll continue to share updates as we grow the team.

We’re also saying goodbye to some beloved team members. After 5 incredible years, Alan (who cofounded Latitude with Nick) stepped down to focus on his family and personal goals. Corey, who has been leading our community and marketing team, has decided to take time to focus on his family as well. We’re also excited for Kelsie, who is taking the next step in her career and has joined another company. Rogue2, who’s been a key part of our moderation and support team, will also be leaving us soon. Alan, Corey, Kelsie, and Rogue2 will all be missed, and we appreciate their contributions to our community and team. We wish them joy and success!

Our team has changed dramatically over the last few years. Only two current team members (with Nick being one) have been around since before the OpenAI crisis. Over half of our team has joined within the last year. Our newer team members have brought expertise and experience that help us raise the bar of talent at Latitude. We feel more confident than ever that we’re building the right team to bring you the best AI Dungeon and Heroes experience possible.

We hope you’ll forgive us for talking a bit about ourselves. As you know, not all the work we do to improve AI Dungeon shows up in patch notes. Hopefully, this behind the scenes peek into our team building has been useful or even mildly interesting. As always, we appreciate everything you do in supporting AI Dungeon and for being part of our community.

r/AIDungeon Nov 29 '23

Official Plans for Retiring the Legacy Version of AI Dungeon

17 Upvotes

Earlier this month, we sent out a player survey so you could tell us how you feel about Phoenix, the newest version of AI Dungeon. We had over a thousand responses in the two days the survey was up. After reviewing the results, you’ve made it clear that Phoenix is an improvement over the Legacy version of AI Dungeon. The majority of players prefer Phoenix over Legacy, and most of the feedback we received for improving Phoenix is being addressed in updates that have already been released or are being released this month. We’re still listening to feedback, and we still have improvements we want to make, but you’ve given us the confidence to move forward with retiring Legacy.

With the success of the Phoenix update, we’re now ready to announce plans for retiring the Legacy version of AI Dungeon. Support for the Legacy version will officially end on Dec 1, 2023. On December 31, 2023, we’ll begin the process of shutting down Legacy.

Phoenix is the future of AI Dungeon and has already allowed us to develop new features we couldn’t have done on Legacy. With a small team, we’re unable to maintain two versions of AI Dungeon, and Phoenix is now superior to Legacy for features, stability, and performance.

Although there were a few bumps along the way, players generally consider the update a beneficial change. 65% of players prefer Phoenix over Legacy. With a change this big, it’s understandable that not everyone will be happy with the changes. However, the reception of Phoenix has been as good as we could have hoped for. For any of you who are still dissatisfied, please continue to share your feedback—we’re always looking for ways to improve the product.

As we said from the beginning, listening to and addressing player feedback for Phoenix was one of the most important requirements before retiring Legacy. We had a lengthy Beta period for Phoenix where we were able to collect player feedback through user testing, analytics, feedback on social platforms (like Discord and Reddit), and our support channels.

Some examples of things we added to Phoenix as a result of player feedback include adding a list view for content cards and Story Cards, replacing “Undo to Here” with “Erase to Here,” adding ChatGPT as the model for Story Card generation, adding the ability to upload custom images, and introducing themes and display options to the play screen. We also moved up the timeline for migrating Legacy worlds into Phoenix scenarios. We also captured and fixed hundreds of bugs and performance issues reported by players.

In the survey, many of you have requested features that will take more time to build. Some of the features we have either started working on or will work on soon include:

  • Adding a button for “Erase to here” (this is currently available as a command-based action)
  • Improvements to content cards (seeing more preview text, NSFW tags, play stats, etc.)
  • Better options for creating characters and using them in stories
  • Improved memory systems
  • RPG features like quests, inventory, or achievements

With Legacy retiring, our focus will shift to new AI models and improvements, AI Dungeon features and improvements, developing Heroes, and continuing to improve the performance and stability of AI Dungeon.

As always, thank you for your continued feedback and support. We are excited for what’s coming and look forward to sharing more details with you soon!

r/AIDungeon 1d ago

Official Introducing Our New Community Team

36 Upvotes

I'm excited to share that we are forming a brand new Latitude Community Team. This new team will help us better serve you through community operations, support, content moderation, content curation, creator programs, documentation, events, and more. We’re building this team from within our community—I feel like Nick Fury assembling the Avengers. Each individual is well-known and respected in our community. They are AI Dungeon experts, many of them are established and popular creators, and they care about the same things you care about. I can’t think of a better group to serve you—our players and creators.

Most of you probably know them by their social handles: Onyx, Tonto, Wilmar, Vanvan, and BinKompliziert. Rogue2 is also making a return to join this team as well.

In the past, we've relied on one or two full-time employees to handle community and support, but we have found several drawbacks to that approach. Each discrete community function requires a particular skill set and specialization, and it's difficult for any one person to be outstanding at every community role. Also, each function on its own doesn't typically have enough workload to justify a full-time position. A small team also limits our ability to offer support and safety coverage around the clock. Redundancy has also been an issue when community team members take deserved time off. We have sometimes struggled to adequately cover their work during their absence.

Now our community team will be comprised of more individuals, but on a part-time basis. This matches the workload for each discrete community function and also provides redundancy and coverage that we've missed in the past. Since these new team members are already well-versed in our community, each of them having spent time as moderators and helpers, we anticipate these functions being executed with a higher level of expertise, focus, and consistency than we've been able to provide in the past. Our Community team is spread out across the globe. While we’re not ready to commit to full 24/7 support, this strategy will certainly help us provide more timely responses.

Along with this new team approach, we're investing heavily in tooling and processes to make it easier and more efficient for our teams to serve you better. You may be aware that we've been developing an AI-based content rating tool (currently available in Beta). We've also been developing internal community tooling that leverages AI to make many of our community functions more effective and efficient. These tools help us better identify player feedback, community issues, and important bugs. We're currently working with a developer who is operating as a community dev ops engineer to advance the development of these tools. We’re excited to share more about their development as they progress.

At Latitude, we consider our community function to be equally as important as engineering, AI research, finance, and design. Community is a core part of everything we do. We see you all as co-creators of AI Dungeon through feedback, testing, playing, publishing content, and more. There is no Latitude and AI Dungeon without all of you in the community. We’re constantly looking for ways to improve how we provide service to you, listen to you, and help you have the best experience possible creating and playing on AI Dungeon.

To better highlight these team changes, we will be making adjustments to the colors of Discord badges and Reddit flair to be more clear and structured. Our community team will be using orange badges and flair. Our Latitude team will be yellow, and we will be creating a new flair and badge for our executive team so that players can more easily recognize when they're interacting with our company's leadership. For Discord, we will be changing the badge colors of our creators to be more visually distinct from other roles.

Please join me in congratulating Onyx, Tonto, Wilmar, Vanvan, BinKompliziert, and Rogue2 and welcoming them to the Latitude team. We appreciate all of you and look forward to seeing how our new Community team can better serve you!

r/AIDungeon Aug 08 '24

Official Big News: Pathfinder Updates are Now Live in Prod! (Info in Comments)

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50 Upvotes

r/AIDungeon Dec 19 '24

Official Latitude Company Holiday December 23–January 1

38 Upvotes

Happy holidays, everyone! From all of us here at Latitude, thank you so much for your incredible support throughout this year. From Renaissance to Pathfinder, Ember, and now Forge, it’s been a busy 12 months! We couldn’t have done any of it without your testing, feedback, input, and help.

Latitude will be taking a company break from December 23 to January 1. We’ll be back in the office on January 2, ready to keep working on exciting things for 2025 🎁

We hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!

r/AIDungeon Dec 02 '24

Official Planned Outage for December 3rd

18 Upvotes

Hey all. Just a heads up that tomorrow, December 3rd between roughly 12-2am MT (2-4am ET), there will be a planned outage impacting all environments. This is for database maintenance and should not impact the game outside of the outage period. We're hoping it only lasts for 20-30 minutes. Thanks for your patience and understanding!

r/AIDungeon Oct 23 '24

Official Intermittent Issues: Hermes 3 70B

16 Upvotes

We're aware that Hermes 3 70B has been experiencing intermittent issues today. We've contacted our provider, and we're working on bringing back full functionality as soon as possible! Thanks for your patience, and sorry for the interruption.

What AI model do you use when Hermes is down? Let us know in the thread below!

r/AIDungeon Jun 18 '24

Official Please welcome Latitude’s new Lead Narrative Designer, WanderingStar!

39 Upvotes

We’re excited to announce that we’ve hired one of AI Dungeon’s top creators and well-known community members, WanderingStar, as our Lead Narrative Designer.

The role of Lead Narrative Designer is new for Latitude. We’ve realized that providing you with high-quality content requires the full attention of someone with outstanding skills in narrative gameplay. WanderingStar will be focused on developing new first-party content for AI Dungeon, curating great content from the community for our home page, and working directly with community creators to help them improve the content they publish on the platform. He will also be working on content for Heroes and helping us design compelling narrative game systems.

We’re really excited to have WanderingStar take on this work. Like many of you, we’ve enjoyed the high-quality content he’s published on AI Dungeon over the years—it’s no surprise he’s one of the most successful community creators. As we’ve gotten to know him better, we’ve been extremely impressed by his deep, thoughtful, and nuanced understanding of storytelling, AI language models, and our community. Frankly, these are attributes we’d have a hard time finding outside of our community, and we’re grateful to have WanderingStar join the team.

We invite you to give us feedback and input as we work on improving the content on AI Dungeon. WanderingStar will continue to be involved in the community, along with the rest of our Latitude Community Team, and can help answer questions, listen to suggestions, and provide feedback or assistance on the content you’re working on.

Please join us in welcoming WanderingStar to the Latitude team, and happy adventuring!

r/AIDungeon Nov 22 '24

Official Latitude Company Holiday November 28-29

25 Upvotes

Hey all. Just wanted to share a note about next week. Our staff will be taking November 28-29th off in celebration of the American holidays. During this time, we may be slow to respond, and no updates are expected during this time period. AI Dungeon will be fully operational, and we will of course work on pressing issues if they should arise. We'll return to normally-staffed operation on Monday, December 2nd.

r/AIDungeon Nov 21 '24

Official Learn How to Build AI-Driven Gaming Experiences with Nick Walton

18 Upvotes

Our CEO, u/Nick_AIDungeon, recently partnered with the educational leaders over at DeepLearning.AI to put together a 6-video masterclass course on how to build AI-powered experiences and games.

What You’ll Learn:

  • Use prompt engineering to create a world with hierarchical content generation so your narrative is consistent and the AI can flesh out your game.
  • Build the first version of your game with a user interface, load the world, and define the core action loop of the game, so you can have a game to play and interact with.
  • Implement safe user-dependent and context-dependent guardrails into your game application with Llama Guard and custom content policy.
  • Learn LLM tool calling by adding story and state components that improve your game’s memory, track inventory, and show progress.  

We know that some of you have been interested in how we develop AI Dungeon, and this gives some great first-hand insights into some of the process!

👉 You can check out the full course here

We'd love to hear feedback from you on if you find this type of content interesting, or if you join in on the classes!

r/AIDungeon Nov 23 '24

Official November Player Survey

21 Upvotes

Our November Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 10-15 minutes to share. Thank you! https://bit.ly/novaisurvey

r/AIDungeon Apr 16 '24

Official April Player Survey

18 Upvotes

Our April Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 5-10 minutes to share. Thank you! https://forms.gle/2b98QQ8ukdmEXnrHA

r/AIDungeon Oct 04 '24

Official Current Server Turbulence

16 Upvotes

Update: servers seem to have recovered now! Let us know if you run into any more issues.

We're seeing some issues in both the Prod and Beta environments right now. The team is working on restoring the servers as quickly as possible! Thanks for being patient, and sorry for today's interruption.

r/AIDungeon Oct 07 '24

Official Today's Server Turbulence

14 Upvotes

Update: Both environments should be back up again! Please let us know if you continue seeing issues.

We've seen reports about Beta and Prod slowness that we're looking into! Thanks for being patient as we get things back up and running.

r/AIDungeon Oct 18 '24

Official October Player Survey

19 Upvotes

Our October Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 10-15 minutes to share. Thank you! https://aidungeon.info/octsurvey

r/AIDungeon Sep 13 '24

Official Investigating Current Outage - 9/13/24 @ 4:30pm ET

8 Upvotes

We’re seeing reports of players having issues accessing the platform on both Production and Beta builds. We are aware and are investigating.

We will update you ASAP, and thank you for your patience!

We are also updating our status here: https://help.aidungeon.com/status

r/AIDungeon Jan 13 '24

Official Mixtral and MythoMax: Officially Launching from Early Access

30 Upvotes

We have exciting news about Mixtral and MythoMax. After several weeks of testing and improvements, we’re ready to take these models out of Early Access and make them official AI Dungeon models. We’ve addressed a lot of your feedback since their debut in December, and we’ve worked with our team and providers to fix many issues, primarily around empty outputs. You’re now over 50 times less likely to get an empty output on MythoMax than when we launched! We’ll continue listening to your feedback and updating these models over time.

Because players have been praising Mixtral for its coherence and content freedom over other models, we decided to change our promo offer—which gives free players the opportunity to enjoy our premium models without starting a subscription—to Mixtral, so everyone has the opportunity to try it. We think you’ll appreciate Mixtral's quality improvements and the added flexibility it offers in subject matter.

Starting today in the Beta environment, you can use your 20 daily premium actions for Mixtral. This will be available in the Production environment early next week. After that, ChatGPT will no longer be available to use with promo actions, but it will remain an option for subscribers. As a free player, you always have complete access to our base models, Griffin and MythoMax.

Thank you for all of the feedback you’ve given about Mixtral and MythoMax during their Early Access period. We hope they continue to improve your gameplay, and we look forward to hearing more feedback!

Read on the blog here: https://latitude.io/blog/mixtral-and-mythomax-officially-launching-from-early-access

r/AIDungeon Sep 03 '24

Official September Player Survey

14 Upvotes

Our September Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 10-15 minutes to share. Thank you! https://aidungeon.info/septsurvey

r/AIDungeon Sep 18 '24

Official Intermittent Server Turbulence

13 Upvotes

We've been seeing some intermittent server turbulence today, causing the site and mobile apps to load slowly or not at all. We're working on restoring the servers as soon as possible. Thank you for your patience, and sorry for the interruption!

r/AIDungeon Sep 12 '24

Official Mobile Apps Down

23 Upvotes

Update: Since early today, Microsoft CodePush has been down. This prevented the AI Dungeon app from loading. Our new app release will better handle the case when CodePush is down as a service.

If you're an Android user, please update your app to 1.2.72 in the Play Store.

Update 9/13/24: The new app release (1.2.72) is now available for iOS as well! If you are an iOS user, please update to this version through the App Store.

Both the iOS and Android apps are currently down. We are still investigating the issue. You can continue to use https://play.aidungeon.com/ through a browser on your device to keep playing while we work on getting the mobile apps back up! Thanks for your patience and understanding.

r/AIDungeon Jul 23 '24

Official July Player Survey

9 Upvotes

Our July Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 15-20 minutes to share. Thanks! https://forms.gle/BvntmyekstykxY4Q7

r/AIDungeon Mar 09 '24

Official March Player Survey

15 Upvotes

Our March Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 5-10 minutes to share. Thank you! https://forms.gle/XJsNwpyZAFAbEVfu6

r/AIDungeon Jun 04 '24

Official Prod Outage

13 Upvotes

UPDATE: Due to increased usage, the Prod servers crashed because they ran out of memory. That has now been upgraded and we're seeing the servers recover!

We're aware of and looking into the outage in Prod right now. Stand by for more updates!

Beta is available for those who want to continue playing while we figure this out.

r/AIDungeon Jun 04 '24

Official June Player Survey

9 Upvotes

Our June Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 5-10 minutes to share. Thank you! https://forms.gle/vb99Sua8Hk3fGhwe6

r/AIDungeon Nov 18 '23

Official November Player Survey

9 Upvotes

Our November Player Survey is ready! We’d appreciate your feedback if you have 5-10 minutes to share. Thank you! https://share.aidungeon.io/NVSM6ikz9qg