We see Endless Visual Novel primarily as a game, not a writing tool. We want EVN to be easy to jump into and use right away, without having to play around with complicated settings and adjustments. However, you do have control over how the story will turn out. Thus, you could also think of EVN as a tool for creating Choose-Your-Own-Adventure (CYOA) visual novels.

The underlying engine is about 35% done. The video you see above is a concept video and not 100% accurate to what the game will actually look like, although it's very close to how our current demos look.

We are currently using OpenAI's largest GPT-3 model, davinci, to generate stories. We will also have GPT-J available as an alternative.

The sprites will be generated using a finetuned StyleGAN2 model. In the initial version, the backgrounds will be AI-filtered photos, although we will implement an approach using VQGAN and CLIP to generate backgrounds from scratch. This will also allow us to make "CGs" or illustrations especially made for a specific scene.

Initially the generation process will be fully random, but we will implement various ways to steer it later on, so you can get the backgrounds and sprites you want to see.

We will use a variety of neural nets to generate midi samples which will then be further post-processed to improve the quality. Again, initially the soundtrack for each playthrough will be generated randomly, but you will have various ways of controlling it later on.

We will be starting a closed alpha during August 2021. We hope to have a public alpha some time after that.

We will have three tiers: Free, Voyager and Creator. Players in the Free tier will be able to play public stories made by others. Players in the Voyager and Creator tiers can experience their own AI-generated adventures in worlds of their own creation. The pricing for these tiers will be decided later.

We will be using the highly secure encryption algorithm AES-256 to keep your stories secure while they are stored on our server. This means that even the NSA won't be able to read your stories, much less us.

Generated assets such as sprites and backgrounds will not be encrypted, but we will not be able to link them to your account in any way. In addition, we may collect anonymized snippets and additional metadata while you are playing to help us improve the AI. This additional metadata will eventually be aggregated and none of it can be linked to your account.

EndlessVN is developed by Augnition, a small R&D company based in Helsinki, Finland.

We are planning to implement multiplayer, although it won't yet be available for the initial public alpha.