I'm Alison, founder of Black Water. I previously worked on growth and marketing at ByteDance/TikTok, but I've always been obsessed with fan fiction and emergent storytelling.
Today, we are launching our Technical Alpha: a browser-based narrative game generated by our self-developed gaming engine powered by Local LLMs & Unity.
The Problem:
AI Startups: Building "Co-pilots" or "Asset Generators" for devs, or tech demos where you just chat with an NPC. None of it was a cohesive, playable game.
Game Studios: Stuck in behavior trees and scripted dialogue. No one was successfully bridging the gap between LLM hallucination and Unity's rigid game states.
What we built: the Orchestration Layer that makes LLMs actually playable.
The Stack: Unity (Frontend) + Agent Orchestrator (Backend) + LLM (Reasoning).
The Breakthrough: We mapped unstructured LLM outputs to structured Unity game states. This allows the AI to not just "talk," but to drive the narrative flow, trigger events, and manage pacing—without breaking the game logic.
It's a "Wrapper," but...
Yes, under the hood, we are wrapping models. But the magic isn't the model; it's the State Machine that keeps the story coherent and "fun" (a metric often ignored in AI).
The Alpha:
It’s a single-player narrative experience. We focused 100% on Gameplay Loop and Aesthetics, not just tech.
Play here: [alpha.blackwaterlabs.io] (Access Code: BW2025)
Note: It’s early. We want to know if the "Emergent Narrative" actually feels like a game to you, or if it still feels like a chatbot in a costume.
Roast us in the comments. I’m here to answer questions about our Unity integration and prompt engineering architecture.
Hello HN,
I'm Alison, founder of Black Water. I previously worked on growth and marketing at ByteDance/TikTok, but I've always been obsessed with fan fiction and emergent storytelling.
Today, we are launching our Technical Alpha: a browser-based narrative game generated by our self-developed gaming engine powered by Local LLMs & Unity.
The Problem: AI Startups: Building "Co-pilots" or "Asset Generators" for devs, or tech demos where you just chat with an NPC. None of it was a cohesive, playable game. Game Studios: Stuck in behavior trees and scripted dialogue. No one was successfully bridging the gap between LLM hallucination and Unity's rigid game states.
What we built: the Orchestration Layer that makes LLMs actually playable. The Stack: Unity (Frontend) + Agent Orchestrator (Backend) + LLM (Reasoning). The Breakthrough: We mapped unstructured LLM outputs to structured Unity game states. This allows the AI to not just "talk," but to drive the narrative flow, trigger events, and manage pacing—without breaking the game logic.
It's a "Wrapper," but... Yes, under the hood, we are wrapping models. But the magic isn't the model; it's the State Machine that keeps the story coherent and "fun" (a metric often ignored in AI).
The Alpha: It’s a single-player narrative experience. We focused 100% on Gameplay Loop and Aesthetics, not just tech. Play here: [alpha.blackwaterlabs.io] (Access Code: BW2025) Note: It’s early. We want to know if the "Emergent Narrative" actually feels like a game to you, or if it still feels like a chatbot in a costume.
Roast us in the comments. I’m here to answer questions about our Unity integration and prompt engineering architecture.