SAN FRANCISCO--(BUSINESS WIRE)--AuraVale is a cozy life sim game where your words shape your story. Incite was founded to redefine how stories are told in games and is building the world’s first agentic life simulation game.
AuraVale is a life sim game featuring living characters called Aura. Players can customize Auras by writing their backstory, personality, and motivations in their own words, bringing them to life. The game allows players to create relationships, build cozy homes, and develop a thriving town with friends.
Agentic Life Sim
The core innovation powering AuraVale is its use of agentic technology, inspired by Joon Park’s paper, Generative Agents: Interactive Simulacra of Human Behavior. Park became an investor and advisor for Incite after the company completed A16Z’s SPEEDRUN accelerator in 2023.
“Agentic tech is the next frontier of gaming, unlocking a new category of game where you play with agents that feel like real players. We’ve built 8 prototypes over the last year and have seen the magic. Life Simulation is especially exciting because it allows us to simulate life in a new way that wasn’t possible before,” said Incite CEO Andrew Friday.
AuraVale’s unique gameplay mechanics center around Auras, a new kind of digital life. Auras are powered by LLMs and feel more like real players than traditional NPCs. Auras can not only speak, but can also understand players and make their own plans.
"The foundation of the game is your Aura. It's not a traditional NPC, nor merely an avatar, it's something new," said Dan Fessler, Incite's Chief Creative Officer. "Your Aura is your digital twin; one that not only looks the way you want them to look, but behaves how you want them to behave."
It should also be noted that while AuraVale uses LLMs to generate Aura dialog based on player’s words, there is no generative AI art in the game.
“Outside of our mission to incite the best stories in games, we want to create an immersive world where players want to spend time. We believe that the passion and care that goes into our hand-drawn aesthetic is critical to creating a game that players fall in love with,” said Fessler.
UGC and Emergent Narrative
At its core, AuraVale is a game about creation. Not only do players create interesting characters and build them a home, but they also create stories with a fresh new twist: their words.
“Now that characters can have the ability to speak, the stories that can be told are an order of magnitude more engaging than previously possible in unscripted games. And because language is universal, AuraVale can appeal to a much broader audience than ever before”, said Andrew Friday, CEO of Incite.
One of the core design pillars behind AuraVale is the UGC infrastructure that powers the game. Using Incite's agentic platform, players can craft and share scenarios with natural language. The team has deep roots in the UGC space, including Incite’s CTO, Nico Coderre, who was one of the first 20 employees at ROBLOX.
“Originally, we called this project The Everything Story Engine and have architected it to be UGC at its core. We see AuraVale becoming a massive virtual world filled with countless player creations that can become part of your story,” said Nico Coderre, CTO of Incite.
Learn more about AuraVale
AuraVale will launch on Steam first in 2025. Players can wishlist the game on Steam, or sign-up to learn more at AuraVale.io.
About Incite
Incite Interactive is an agentic game studio led by industry veterans from Zynga, The Sims, and Roblox, and are backed by A16Z’s Speedrun, Earthling VC, and gaming industry angels.
Learn more about the team at Incite.dev.
