Bumblebee presents its new offline Smart NPCs engine

Bumblebee Studios :

We’ve been silent for a while, which led some to speculate that Vaudeville was dead. But we’re happy to tell you that’s not the case at all. As you know, we are a small team, and when we’re hard at work, we don’t have much time for chit-chat. We prefer to focus on delivering results rather than making promises. So, finally, we’re back with an announcement—and what an announcement it is!

As some may remember, about 15 months ago, we at Bumblebee Studios created a sensation by launching Vaudeville, the first detective game with AI-driven characters. To achieve this, we used a third-party online service called Inworld, which has been great. We’ve had a solid collaboration with them and are satisfied with the results so far. However, there are downsides to relying on a third-party tool: high service costs, the need for an internet connection, the risk of outages or sudden discontinuation, and most importantly, the fact that the service is like a black box to us, unpredictable and impossible to fully customize to our needs.

Now, brace yourselves, because we’re breaking new ground again! Today, we are thrilled to announce the availability of our very own offline beta version of Vaudeville, built with LLMs, text-to-speech, and speech recognition models, all fine-tuned, prompted, and implemented to run locally by us.

The most immediate benefit players will notice is that they no longer need an internet connection to play the game. None of their in-game conversations with characters will ever leave their device, ensuring even stronger privacy. With this innovation, we are building a better and more reliable Vaudeville. But the best part is yet to come: in the long term, this will allow us to develop more advanced features, create new functionalities tailored to our game design needs, and introduce fresh stories, not only in the Vaudeville and detective genres but also in entire new universes!

As of now, the new offline version of the game is available in the beta channel on Steam, ready for testing and feedback. The current online version will continue to run in the main channel for some time until we’re fully satisfied and ready to promote the offline version to the top spot. To try it out, Steam users can simply right-click on the game, select Properties, switch to the Beta tab, and choose "Beta" from the dropdown.

We’re still optimizing the game, both in terms of gameplay and performance. Running LLMs locally can be quite demanding on players' GPUs, and we’re working to improve that. During this phase, our goal is to replicate the same experience offline that the online version provided. Players should expect bugs, strange character behavior, long loading times, and possible crashes on some systems. Once we’ve ironed out these issues, we’ll move on to the second phase: enhancing the game even further.

We hope our audience is as excited about this development as we are, and that they appreciate our commitment to growing Vaudeville. Stay tuned because there might be more big news coming soon!

Vaudeville on Steam: https://store.steampowered.com/app/2240920/Vaudeville