Web3 ecosystem Sanko has officially announced that it has secured a grant from the Arbitrum Foundation that enables them to deliver tools for creating a variety of AI-powered web3 gaming experiences.

What Will Sanko Use the Arbitrum Grant For?

According to the official announcement thread, the plan is to deliver a set of AI integrations and bring partner projects to life throughout the next year as native experiences on Sanko. In doing so, crypto gamers can look forward to enjoying unique MMOs and single-player games.

The suite of AI integrations seems to consist of the Sanko Imagination Toolkit, a UGC platform that allows users to create their own in-game assets such as items, weapons, and cosmetics. All assets are set to be customizable and fully rigged, allowing creators to fine-tune ready-made items to fit within the environments they create, with generated models set to have a couple of different variations and textures to work with. It looks like it will be possible to generate modular clothing items and weapons as well, so you can fully alter the appearance of your playable character to your liking. Custom rooms are also specifically mentioned as an included feature of the toolkit, with matching furniture set to be included as well to fit the theme of the room you create. Users will also be able to set up their own puzzles and traps by creating finite state machines.

These creation tools that make up the toolkit will use the latest SOTA (State of the art) AI models “on the bleeding edge of AI research” in order to allow developers to set up generative sound, photo-realistic Gaussian Splat environments, and 3D art style LoRAs. There will even be recursive modular generation, giving you full control over each part of a generated item. There are also plans to develop an object marketplace, where both creators and players get to share, collect, and exchange their custom assets.

AI will also be used to deliver reactive environmental gameplay. This will make PvE gameplay feel more challenging, but also make each playthrough feel different, because your past behavior and decisions can lead to different enemy placements, narrative paths, and resource availability, with gameplay strategies said to be recorded to train AI models. These models will also be trained using “Reinforcement Learning with Human Feedback and Direct Preference Optimisation”, so you can expect enemies to learn your playstyle and thus figure out your next moves more easily, requiring you to continuously adapt.

“By combining various SoTA techniques, Sanko games will create a new standard for emergent gameplay. Players insert their own creativity into characters and game worlds to express their personality and differentiate themselves, which will create a sophisticated and evolving metaverse economy.”

How Will Sanko’s Agentic AI Companions Work?

Next to all the other development plans, the grant will also help the team create agentic AI companions. These agents will develop their own personalities as they evolve alongside you and potentially improve gameplay. Custom modified LLMs will power these companions using “cute think-tokens" that control in-game actions. This includes interactions with other characters, as well as social functions such as using emotes and chat. Each companion will have mood parameters, so you’ll want to regularly feed and play with your companion to keep it in a good mood.

It looks like you will be able to read their “thought tokens” so you can see the logic they use in making their decisions, helping you alter your pet to work differently. With prompts players will be able to give various instructions to their companion pets; whether they listen or not will depend on their mood, and should they reject your input, they will just go back to using their own inner reasoning based on their personality. Thanks to an AI compatible scene graph, NPCs will have unique interactions with each other with full awareness of their environment, the situation they’re in and the time of day. So even when you’re not online to play with your pets, they’ll go about doing their own thing via a persistent agent framework that lets them react to market events and whatever else they find interesting on social media.

Last month, Tarta Games secured an Arbitrum Foundation grant for Spot Zero development.