Story Tools Studio harnesses cutting-edge generative AI (gen AI) technologies to craft immersive, personalized, and infinite storytelling experiences.
Roy Altman, Founder and CEO at Story Tools Studio says, “Our flagship game Myth Maker AI leverages MUSE, an internally developed AI-powered, expert-guided story generator that blends a growing collection of advanced AI technology with creative artistry to weave real time narratives.”
The company’s founders have backgrounds in stage, film, and video production, and both share a deep love of gaming. When ChatGPT first launched, they immediately recognized an opportunity to redefine gaming experiences. And so Story Tools Studio and its MUSE engine were born.
MUSE (Modular User Story Engine) combines professionally crafted stories with user-empowered experiences. Players make intentional choices that guide the story with AI adapting to each decision in real time, providing a unique and personalized journey. MUSE separates the story from game mechanics, allowing the development of multiple game types. Its use of AI creates more agile teams with fewer dependencies.
Generating gameplay with AI
When a player starts a game in Myth Maker AI, they are presented with the option to choose their starting hero character. Under the covers, MUSE calls the GPT4 API, which takes the player’s selection and writes a fully customized adventure premise. From that initial personalized script, MUSE programmatically calls specialized AI models to collaboratively generate an immersive, multimodal gaming experience using images, animation, audio, and soon, video and 3D.
Altman says, “For story generation and text to voice, we run mainly in Azure’s OpenAI service. Visual assets are created via Leonardo AI, and we are constantly experimenting with new models to create richer modalities. Right now my team is working on generating enhanced 3D assets and video from text prompts. With the pace of AI advancement, the creativity of my team, and the input from our game testers, we are continuously deploying new features. And MongoDB with its dynamic and flexible document data model gives my developers the freedom to do that. This enables us to build a truly innovative, artistic platform, opening up a whole new world of experiences for both creators and audiences alike.”
By selecting MongoDB, we were able to create a prototype of our game in just 48 hours. It is only with MongoDB that we can release new features to production multiple times per day. We couldn’t achieve any of this with a relational database.
Roy Altman, Founder and CEO at Story Tools Studio
AI, transactions, and analytics with MongoDB
Altman’s engineering team has used MongoDB Atlas from the very start of the company. MongoDB stores all of the data used in the platform — user data, scripts, characters, worlds, coins, and prompts are all richly structured objects stored natively in MongoDB. The games are built in React and Javascript.
Beyond gameplay, the company’s developers are now exploring MongoDB’s ACID transactional integrity to support in-game monetization, alongside in-app intelligence to further improve the gaming experience through player analytics.
“By running MongoDB in Atlas, my engineering team is free to focus on AI-driven gaming experiences, and not on the grind of managing a database,” says Altman. “MongoDB has scaled seamlessly and automatically as we’ve graduated from our closed beta into public beta today. Every 24 hours we are organically adding dozens of new players with tens of gigabytes of new data streaming into the platform. We expect this to grow quickly when we kick off our marketing campaigns.”
What's next?
Myth Maker AI is just the start. Story Tools Studio has plans for multiple games in the next 12 to 18 months. At the same time MUSE is an extensible platform — the company is also looking to explore content generation outside of gaming in areas such as education and training.
Story Tools Studio is a member of the MongoDB AI Innovators program providing it with access to Atlas credits and technical best practices, allowing its engineers to freely explore what’s possible with gen AI and MongoDB. You can get started with your AI-powered apps by registering for MongoDB Atlas and exploring the tutorials available in our AI resources center.
You can also learn more about why the world’s largest games run on MongoDB.