How to Use ChatGPT With Unity?

Are you wondering how you can use ChatGPT with the Unity game engine?

Generative AI in the gaming market is increasingly becoming popular, with the global market expected to reach USD 7,105 million by 2032. Big gaming companies like Minecraft have already adopted the technique of generative and non-deterministic AI to offer gamers a more dynamic gaming experience.

ChatGPT by OpenAI is an advanced AI model built on generative artificial intelligence. The large language model can understand your instruction prompts and provide text-based responses, almost like humans. 

Like with many other tasks, from app development and creative writing to research and tutoring, game developers are also motivated to find applications of ChatGPT in game design and development.

Developing an interactive Unity game with ChatGPT-powered features requires a deep understanding of natural language processing, large language models, Python frameworks and libraries for deep neural networks, etc., on top of exceptional game design and development skills.

If you don’t have a professional team with the relevant expertise to take on the complex task, then submit a request for a complimentary discovery call, and one of our tech account managers who managed similar projects will contact you shortly

38% of game developers use Unity, a cross-platform game engine, as their primary game engine. No wonder you want to explore the use of ChatGPT with it. Let’s see how you can leverage ChatGPT with Unity.

Using ChatGPT With the Unity Engine

You can integrate ChatGPT into your Unity gaming application as follows:

1. Explore different use cases for integrating ChatGPT with Unity

ChatGPT can help you introduce several engaging features in a video game application. Some of the use cases of ChatGPT with Unity include the following:

• Dynamic NPCs (Non-playable characters): ChatGPT can help design realistic NPCs capable of holding human-like conversations with players and creating a more engaging experience.
• Interactive Storytelling: You can develop dynamic storytelling in your game where gamers can interact with AI characters powered by ChatGPT. Players can alter ChatGPT responses according to their preferences.
• Personalized Experience: ChatGPT can also be used to create advanced ChatGPT-powered personalization. ChatGPT model can be trained to gauge user gaming expertise and interest and implement an adaptive difficulty feature.
• Virtual Chat Rooms: ChatGPT can help create interactive chat rooms where game players can interact and socialize and use ChatGPT to initiate conversations, type replies, etc.

2. Form a competent team to initiate the project planning

We assume you plan to develop a video game using the Unity game engine and want to integrate ChatGPT to enhance its interactivity. You need an experienced team of professionals to plan this project. 

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Onboard an experienced project manager to plan the overall project scope, resource allocation, project milestones, risk assessment, etc. Your project manager should be proficient in the best project management practices and experienced in using robust development frameworks.

You also need a business analyst on your project team to help you with requirements gathering, market research, developing user stories, cost estimation, etc.

A competent software architect would devise a technical solution for your ChatGPT integration project, address scalability and performance requirements, plan various API integrations with third-party libraries, etc.

3. Analyze and document project specifications and scope 

This step is crucial as it ensures a clear understanding of your team on what needs to be done and sets the roadmap for them to follow throughout the project. 

Your project manager and business analyst need to collaborate with all the stakeholders, including investors and end users to gather ChatGPT integration project requirements. 

The team would define project objectives, milestones, and success criteria. They can employ an Agile work breakdown structure (WBS) that breaks down the whole project into smaller and more manageable tasks and subtasks to better understand project requirements and dependencies.

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Draft a project scope statement that clearly states the project’s boundaries, inclusions, and exclusions. Your project manager should conduct a comprehensive review of the scope statement to ensure it aligns with stakeholder expectations.

Your team should also define and follow project documentation change control and version control processes throughout the project lifecycle.

4. Decide on the approach of integrating ChatGPT into Unity

You can adopt one of the three main approaches to using ChatGPT with the Unity engine. These are as follows:

1. Use a third-party Unity Asset for ChatGPT integration

Your developers can use a ready-to-use unity asset for ChatGPT integration. This option requires minimum coding but also offers limited customization options. 

For example, Bitsplash offers Chat GPT for Games – AI Integration asset that allows developers to set up ChatGPT-powered conversation in their games instantly. The asset offers one non-playable character that takes instructions from the Unity inspector and then uses ChatGPT to interact with the player.

It also comes with editor tools with a drag-and-drop feature, a guide, and tutorials to get started with the ChatGPT integration for your gaming videos.

Although Bitsplash offers source code and claims that it is quite easy to understand and add, there are not many customization options available for your game developers to create an innovative gaming experience. 

2. Integrate the ChatGPT model into Unity Code using APIs or SDKs

You can also directly integrate OpenAI models, gpt-3.5-turbo (used by ChatGPT) and GPT-4 (with a wait list), into your Unity code. Your developers need to use available APIs or wrapper SDKs for this purpose. 

They need to write API requests from Unity to the ChatGPT model. They can use Unity networking libraries for this purpose. For example, send HTTP requests using UnityWebRequest, parse the response from ChatGPT, and integrate the generated text into the game’s dialogue system.

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Learn more on how to use ChatGPT API in our detailed article here.

Game developers can also use wrapper SDKs, such as those available in Python and C#/.Net, to efficiently integrate and communicate with gpt models in your Unity code.

We have explained in detail how to use ChatGPT SDKs in our article here.

While this approach is pretty straightforward, and your developers can use it to integrate the ChatGPT model into Unity with minimum coding expertise, this option does not offer many customization options.

You could only use the ChatGPT chatbot application as is in your gaming application for generating text and holding AI-powered conversations with game players. 

Please note the above two approaches do not offer much to build a unique gaming experience using ChatGPT and Unity. This takes us to the third method of using ChatGPT with your Unity code.

3. Integrate a custom GPT model into your Unity code

OpenAI has made available its GPT models to train and finetune them according to specific requirements. 

With custom GPT model training and development, your game developers can create unique gaming features that meet your specific business needs. For example, you might plan to use a custom ChatGPT model with Unity for the following features:

• Enhanced context retention by training the ChatGPT model to retain context over longer conversations:
• Player-created content to allow gamers to create personalized game narratives;
• Multi-language support to display game information in multiple languages;
• Domain-specific language understanding that allows the model to understand distinct terms related to various gaming genres like action, adventure, sports, and even your unique brand-related vocabulary.

This approach requires exceptional skills in machine learning model development, natural language processing techniques, etc. Moreover, developers need to be skilled in using programming languages like Python, AI development tools, and libraries. 

Steps for custom ChatGPT integration

While the development process is complex, you get exciting opportunities to create a unique gaming experience. You need to go through the following steps for custom ChatGPT model development:

• Prepare the game-specific data you want to train and finetune your custom ChatGPT model on.
• Use plugins to integrate custom models into Unity. For example, 
  • TensorFlowSharp is a Unity plugin that allows developers to use NLP models in Unity. You can use TensorFlow to train your model and then use TensorFlow Sharp to adapt and deploy it into the Unity application.
  • Unity ML-Agents is an open-source toolkit your developers can use to train ML models. It is specifically designed to support reinforcement learning and can be used to customize ChatGPT models.
• Your game developers would design game characters, including their traits and responses. These AI characters would interact with gamers using ChatGPT-powered conversations.
• Define input and output handling, including how to provide input to the ChatGPT and how the application will interpret model responses to create an engaging game experience.
• Plan how you would optimize model performance during the gameplay, such as caching requests to the model to minimize latency and enhance performance.
• Implement error-handling mechanisms to handle situations where your custom model might give inaccurate responses.
• Test your custom model integration with Unity to ensure it works as expected. Your model should give coherent and contextually correct responses. Use users’ feedback on model implementation to refine its performance.

Note: As the custom model integration gives you more creative opportunities to design and develop a unique game using advanced generative AI as the base model, we assume you would go with the third approach of using ChatGPT with Unity.

5. Plan the project to use ChatGPT with the Unity application

Your project manager should plan the project comprehensively, covering all the main aspects of game application development, including the following:

• Technical environment of the project;
• Target platforms;
• Game mechanics and design;
• Art and sound direction;
• Animation integration;
• Project milestones and deliverables;
• Quality assurance;
• Risk management;
• Project documentation;
• Communications channels, etc.

6. Form a team to undertake the ChatGPT Unity project

You need a competent team to undertake the ChatGPT-Unity game development project. Hire professionals for the following roles:

• A game developer or Unity developer who implements a game with ChatGPT model integrations;
• A game designer with skills in designing the game concept and mechanics;
• An NLP expert with expertise in NLP and AI models;
• A graphic designer with expertise in creating visual assets, like game characters, UI elements, etc.;
• An audio engineer who manages audio elements and produces sound effects and background music, etc.;
• A QA tester.

Take the following steps to hire for the above roles:

A. Choose a hiring platform

Decide on the hiring platform. You might find the idea of hiring freelancers attractive, however, this option is quite risky. There are several freelance marketplaces offering a range of developers at low hourly rates. However, these platforms do not offer any hiring or project management support.

You are on your own to filter through loads of freelancers’ profiles and vet game developers and AI engineers for your ChatGPT Unity project. 

Moreover, freelancers often work on multiple projects at a time and have minimum bandwidth to take up complex development tasks. Project management also gets difficult with individual freelancers who have not worked together ever before, that too from different time zones.

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A reliable option is to hire dedicated developers from a credible software development company, like DevTeam.Space. All our developers are vetted for their skills in the latest technologies and work under the supervision of an experienced technical project manager. 

B. Conduct interviews

Now that you have chosen a hiring platform, post your developer requirements and shortlist candidates to conduct interviews.

Ask technical questions to gauge the practical knowledge and experience of designers and developers. Explain your ChatGPT game project requirements and ask developers how they would approach different development tasks. 

Take help from our interview questions and answers, such as the following:

• Python interview questions;
• AWS interview questions;
• C# interview questions.

C. Onboard the new developers

Now that you have finalized your game designers and developers, you should start the onboarding process. Introduce new developers to existing team members. Set up communication channels.

Explain your ChatGPT Unity project requirements in detail to new team members. Provide them access to the necessary code files, project documentation, etc. 

Define your project tasks, assign them to developers, implement a task submission process, and ensure accountability.

7. Execute, monitor, and control ChatGPT with the Unity integration project

Your team now needs to perform the following tasks:

• Design the game UI;
• Code game characters and GPT-based features;
• Develop the required APIs and perform the necessary third-party integrations;
• Test your game scenes and ChatGPT functionality;
• Deploy your gaming application for end-users and monitor the application’s performance.

Your software architect should conduct a comprehensive code review and ensure the quality of your end product. The project manager should oversee these tasks and implement course corrections when necessary.

Planning on Building a Unity Game With ChatGPT?

Using ChatGPT with Unity game development requires considerable effort and technical expertise. The project requires developers with exceptional NLP development skills besides game design and development expertise.

If you lack such talent on your team, we suggest you partner with a software development company with experience in similar development projects, like DevTeam.Space. All our developers are vetted for their skills in advanced game development technologies, including ChatGPT and Unity.

If you wish to know more about how we can help you develop an engaging game application powered by ChatGPT, leave us your initial project specifications via this quick form. One of our account managers will contact you shortly for further assistance.

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