The Kraken Wakes News

Firstly, we wanted to say thank you to you, our Kraken Wakes community, for all of your support over the past few years. We loved creating The Kraken Wakes and sharing our development journey with you, and we’ve enjoyed seeing how players interact with the characters and story world over the last year.

Sadly, due to a change in our business focus, we can no longer provide the level of technical support needed to maintain a game like The Kraken Wakes, so it’s with a heavy heart that we’ve made the decision to withdraw Kraken from the Steam store. Players who’ve purchased the game already will still have access to it, though we can’t guarantee that any bugs encountered during gameplay will be able to be fixed. If you have any questions about the removal of Kraken from Steam, you can contact us via our Charisma.ai Discord.

Thank you again for your support of The Kraken Wakes, our world-first adventure into conversational AI-powered gaming. If you’d like to stay up-to-date with our latest interactive AI projects, or even try creating a Charisma.ai-powered story of your own, head over to our website for more information, and follow us on X, Instagram and TikTok.

It's been nearly four weeks since the launch of The Kraken Wakes: an interactive adaptation of John Wyndham's much-loved novel. In the game, you play as a journalist, interviewing, conversing and debating with the characters, typing or speaking your replies. There is no multiple choice. And our worst-kept secret? We can see what you write.

Our (anonymized!) analytics are available instantly, and over the last few weeks, we've had a lot to read through. Node based data shows us exactly what players are replying to specific interactions, and end-to-end transcripts show us a player’s experience across the whole game. Time stamps mean we can see how long players spend in particular places, or with interactable objects.

Per-node analytics listing what players have said to advance from a node asking “How has your day been?”

Transcript: Script-like playthroughs of the player and character dialogue, including action nodes attached to interactables

We can also see how many hits certain paths get, highlighting which are popular, or under-explored, and when choices are balanced.

Playthrough hits: Numbers on connectors show us how many times a player has taken that route

Combined, the analytics give us a comprehensive overview of how people are playing our game. The process is a narrative designer’s dream in itself, and informs our future work, but best of all? We can implement quick-win changes immediately. We don't need to push a new build to Steam, or even open Unreal Engine. All we need to do is make the changes to the nodes in the Charisma graph, test, and click publish, and they will seamlessly appear in the live game.

This iterative process is a vital part of development. In the past 30 days, we have republished Kraken 14 times and continue to do so. Many of the changes are small refinements, but some are more substantial. For example, as of last week, we have very carefully deployed a small amount of generated character dialogue into the live game using a Large Language Model (LLM). The analytics have been crucial in telling us where and how to strategically deploy this technique, and it’s already proving to be a meaningful improvement to player experience.

We have long been exploring the effects of AI generated content in storytelling. In 2021 we collaborated on and wrote a white paper detailing the concept of using LLMs to create a Universal Character Model . This was followed up in 2022 with an outline of our group's first steps using LLMs to generate consistent character dialogue. We're aware of possibilities that these technologies offer us. We're also aware of its downfalls. And so, The Kraken Wakes only utilizes these tools when the analytics have shown we really need it.

When people play Charisma stories, they want to find the edges of the experience. They try to push the characters to say odd (that’s putting it lightly) things. We prepare for this, front-loading our early interactions with as much content as possible. Eventually, if people trust that the system really does work, they cool off. Admittedly, the Kraken analytics revealed that this cooling-off period is longer and more forceful than we expected, and we needed to find ways to handle it. We’ve deployed a few carefully positioned, and strictly author influenced generated lines of dialogue, which are handling these challenges really well. Our intention here is not to let the player write their own story with the characters. Our intention is to keep the ball afloat, to protect the suspension of disbelief, and to keep the player within the realms of the story we are telling.

The Kraken Wakes is not a dynamically generated story. Character dialogue is written by us (there are 10,846 lines of author-written dialogue!), and any generated dialogue is heavily influenced by author intent:



The above is an example of the player “testing” the system. Our NLP matching system has not found an author-written response that suits (shocker!), despite there being over 30 at this interaction point. Instead, it opts to generate dialogue for Freddy’s response. Here the prompt is specifically told to link back to literary genres, keeping the conversation on track.





By using LLMs in this very targeted way, we can see the generated dialogue pick up on a Freddy speech quirk (”Ah”), reference her personal preferences (does not like war stories) and involve the story context (”popular in the current climate”). Our analytics give us visibility of every line that has been generated, and what prompt it used to get there. This means that these too will go through a process of refinement.

Our analytics have been the guiding light to post-launch edits. We hope you've enjoyed playing The Kraken Wakes, and we can't wait to see what you’ll say next!

[h2]Embark on a Ground-breaking Sci-Fi Adventure with the Exclusive Adaptation of John Wyndham's Epic Novel, The Kraken Wakes[/h2]

The Kraken Wakes, the exclusive adaptation of John Wyndham’s classic 1950’s sci-fi/horror novel, is a ground-breaking, immersive conversational cosy apocalypse game. You’ll explore the story by talking or typing to its characters in natural language, influencing their actions and emotions as you shape the narrative. Step into character as a journalist for the prestigious EBC News to unravel an epic mystery, travelling the world and delving deep into the oceans as you investigate a deadly attack on Planet Earth.

Created using Charisma’s AI-powered storytelling platform, The Kraken Wakes takes interactive gaming to a new level. Conversational AI enables exciting new gameplay features that Charisma has been perfecting for some time. NPCs with personalities, memories, opinions and emotions who you can speak to directly, voice-in, voice-out. Devise jaw-dropping headlines, deliver knock-out press conference performances, and negotiate with governments to uncover the truth about the fireballs before it’s too late.

Charisma CEO, Guy Gadney, said: “Unlike other games that limit players to multiple-choice options, The Kraken Wakes offers a more meaningful experience, where every dialogue option has a consequence, and where we can explore the novel’s themes of ecological disaster, militaristic governments and migration. Your words will impact how others perceive and respond to you and how the narrative unfolds.”

“John Wyndham’s star has been rising with audiobooks recorded by Stephen Fry, and TV adaptations of The Midwich Cuckoos and The Day of the Triffids, and we are honoured and excited to produce this adaptation. Wyndham himself was once reviewed as a “cosy catastrophe” sci-fi writer, and we are proud to extend this intimacy and cosiness into the games genre as a pioneering adaptation”, he added.

Get ready to embark upon an epic journey of planetary survival where every conversation counts!

[h3]Establishing a strong visual style for Kraken has been a priority from day one. Until recently, though, the distinctive 50s aesthetic – with its carefully curated colour palette and comic-book visual references – has been largely confined to the gameworld, the spaces inhabited by the player and characters. As we’re approaching (say it quietly) the final stages of development, we wanted to extend that visual style to the user interface (UI) as well: to the menus, buttons and controls, in order to immerse the player from the moment they launch the game. Here’s how we went about it:[/h3]

Brief, inspiration, and initial concepts

My brief was to re-work and develop the placeholder UI for The Kraken Wakes to be both more visually striking and more in-keeping with the game’s 1950s style and themes. This would involve creating a wide range of UI elements including checkboxes, tabs, next/previous controls, input fields, dropdowns, persistent hotkey instructions, content alerts and menu items.

As part of the UI overhaul, we also spent a lot of time thinking about the usability and clarity of the interface – UX as well as UI. This led to the addition of some new features, including a ‘Chapters’ menu page to enable players to track their progress and navigate back to earlier scenes. It wasn’t just a case of creating like-for-like UI elements with a bit more pizzazz: whole new features needed to be developed from scratch.



My process began, as it usually does, with a search for design inspirations. I decided to explore visual styles connected to different themes and aspects of the game, including journalism, under the sea, 1950s adverts and comics, and retro art. I also spent some time researching the UI designs of other games, such as Firewatch, Sea of Thieves and L.A. Noire. As per the brief, my guiding inspiration was the already-established art style of the game (having worked on the props and environments previously, I was already very familiar with this). Below is a small moodboard showing some of the inspirations I referred to while redesigning the UI:



After my initial research, I began drafting some ideas. I sketched some concepts for UI elements in various styles using Adobe Photoshop and Illustrator. I also explored different fonts and colours at this stage.



The team and I consulted back and forth to determine which style worked best for the game. In the end, we agreed that we liked the offset retro block designs, with hand-drawn ticks, crosses, arrows and underlines where the player would interact with certain aspects of the UI. This aesthetic allowed us to reflect the retro, 1950s setting of the game in the UI design, while also referencing the theme of journalism through the hand-drawn elements.



Developing the style

Once we had agreed on a style, I then developed the designs further using Adobe XD. I created examples of what the UI might look like in the game itself by taking screenshots and placing my UI designs and layout over them. This also helped me to develop the colour palette, ensuring it worked with the colours of the game. Here’s my final design for the main gameplay UI:



I regularly updated the team on my progress and, after a few rounds of feedback, I achieved the desired look and feel of the various UI elements of the game. Below are two series of screenshots charting the design development process for the menu and settings pages. On the left are my initial ideas, and on the right are my finished designs.



Finalising the UI

Once the team had approved the final designs, the next step was to separate the UI elements onto individual islands, and to organise the colour palette to be clearly presented for the person arranging the UI in Unreal. Doing this also makes the different elements easier to organise when exporting.



The UI elements had to be exported in a particular way. Each element had to be split up into its different shape components, coloured in white (or black-to-white gradient for UI elements with gradient colours), and then exported separately. This step is required because the UI colours are assigned in Unreal. If the UI components are merged into one object, they cannot be assigned separate colours:



Once everything had been exported, it was up to our programmer, Oscar, to create the functionality of each UI element and make it work in the game!

📣 Exciting Announcement Alert!!! 📣

We've just about recovered from the excitement of Next Fest, which means it's time for more fun Kraken updates! We've been hard at work re-designing our UI to make it more user-friendly and more in-keeping with the 50s setting of the game. We're very excited to share it with you in our updated Kraken demo!

As well as a snazzy new look for our buttons and menus, we also have a brand-new chapters feature to help you keep track of your progress through Kraken.

We'll be leaving our updated demo on Steam for one week only – so check out the new UI while you can, and be sure to let us know what you think on Discord or via this feedback form.

Plus, follow us on Twitter and Instagram for all the latest Kraken news and sneak-previews of the game!