NPCx Q&A – This AI-Based Tech Can Cheaply Animate NPCs and Even Create Drivatar-like Player Clones

wccftech.com:

Florida-based AI startup NPCx recently made the news after securing the lead investor in their $3 million seed round investment. The investor is none other than Kakao Investment, a branch of Kakao Games, known to gamers as the old Western publisher of Black Desert Online and the new publisher of XLGames' ArcheAge, including the hotly anticipated MMO sequel.

NPCx is composed of computer engineers, data scientists, artists, and animators. The startup has a suite of products dedicated to animating non-player characters (NPCs) cheaply, though their key product, BehaviorX, will go one step further and allow them to create Drivatar-like player clones for a variety of uses.

To discuss NPCx and its AI-based products, I had a nice, long chat with co-founder and CEO Cameron Madani. You can find the full conversation (edited for clarity) below.

Cameron, can you talk about yourself and the company?

Sure. Let me give you a real quick background. There's three founders: me, Michael Puscar, and Alberto Menache.

I've been in video game development since 2000 and working on a number of titles in corporate development and business development. In 2011, I started my own first attempt at a game studio.

We worked for Microsoft on a title called Torchlight for the Xbox. It did not do very well, so I decided to focus more on the service side of the business.

In 2014, I started a motion capture and animation studio called Motion Burner. Then I realized there's a lot of repetitive process and it's very, very time and cost-intensive. Some of it is also very manual, so it's not very fun or creative, especially when you talk about motion capture.

I met Michael through a friend. Michael is a serial entrepreneur. He's a computer engineer, but he became a