The Story With Adventure_Mode

Create, Play and Remix Stories Right On Your Phone

After two years of building and exploration, Lore Machine is entering a new era.

Today we launch Adventure_Mode — a steerable storytelling experience that empowers you to create, play and remix multimedia stories.

Here’s a vibee trailer for Adventure_Mode. If you dig it, give us a like or reshare 🙏

Adventure_Mode is now live on web, iOS, and Android.

This is the story of how we got here, and how you can dive into your own interactive adventure today.

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The BACK Back Story

Before we descend down the rabbit hole, allow me to introduce myself. I’m Thobey Campion, a writer and the founder of Lore Machine.

Lore Machine was born out of the fiery furnace of failure. During COVID I escaped to a cabin in Canada, where I wrote about the intersection of science and spirituality. One story - about a CIA report on the scientific underpinnings of astral projection - went viral. Film studios reached out, interested in turning the story into a documentary. But the production never got off the ground; video archival was scarce and animation was too expensive.

At the time, MidJourney and Dall-e were just crawling onto the scene. I remember the moment, when the prompt for a ladybug actually looked like a ladybug. Like others around the world, I recognized the transformative impact this technology would have on the way us humans communicate. Our species has this unique power to bring what we imagine into our shared reality. Now we could transmit visions from our imagination to everyone else on earth instantaneously 🤯

Every generative system at the time worked the same. One prompt in → one image out. As generative video, audio and world systems came online, engineering-centric companies stayed within the confines of that single-prompt paradigm. Despite these limitations, our team started using generative tech to make premium graphic novels, commercially distributed manga and even (ahem) the first generative national television spot in China…all one prompt at a time 🥵

The conclusion: every system sucked at story. Working prompt-by-prompt, it took hundreds of hours to produce graphic novels and tv spots with consistent characters, style and locations, as well as narrative coherence. So we decided to build a solution. We called it Lore Machine. Instead of short prompts, Lore Machine would transform entire books and screenplays into multimedia experiences. We called it Multimedia Generation at Story Scale™ and got to work.

The first users of Lore Machine were screenwriters. But quickly it was educators, video game developers and film studios. The community that changed everything for us was Webtoon makers in South Korea. That community was building story visuals with Lore Machine, then cobbling the assets together into mobile-friendly manga experiences. The use case gave us an idea!

We hatched a new storytelling format called the LORE. On the surface, a LORE looks like a vertically scrollable Webtoon comprised of 3:4 aspect ratio blocks. But that’s just what it looks from above. Below the surface, story builders can craft entire worlds inside each block comprised of imagery, animation, ornaments, comic bubbles and meta-narrative - all editable at the drop of a prompt. While video as a web format is great it can only accommodate so much dimensionality, and it’s hard to assemble. The LORE is uniquely positioned to absorb all the inter-dimensional shapes coming out of AI generators then organize as structured narrative. No assembly required.

Today, 2.5 million LOREs have been crafted by creative folks in 130 countries and 94 languages. You can jump into this magical garden of creation here.

Users build using one of three tools:

1. LORE Builder: Block-by-block LORE construction, using one context-infused prompt at a time.

2. LORE Caster: A generative storytelling console that makes story text creation playable.

3. Story Vis: Uploading a whole screenplay or book then press visualize.

As we released these features, we saw users spending hours moving their blocks around to create what essentially looked like choose-your-own-adventure experiences. So we built an app just for that...

Adventure_Mode Enters The Chat

Six months ago, I reached out to twenty AI researchers around the world with a vision for an interactive storytelling system. Most of the people I talked to got it, one of them REALLY got it. Quietly, former Google AI and Hugging Face researcher/developer Samim Winiger and I began evolving the Lore Machine read-write ecosystem into a playable experience that removes the line between creating content and playing it. The way we described it to friends and family in those early days was, “the TikTok You Can Play.”

If Pro_mode is for creating, Adventure_Mode is for playing. The interface’s ergonomic designs makes it easy to go from idea to audio-visual LORE in minutes.

To create an original LORE, just enter your story idea, characters, art style and opening scene and you’re off! You can even skip the set-up phase by remixing stories from the gallery. Just hit the potion icon on any LORE and the story is yours branch.

Whether you’re inside an original LORE or a remix, you can push the story forward by prompting what happens next, or selecting from four contextually relevant Story Seeds. Every scene can be edited, animated and decorated infinitely. When it’s perfect, on to the next!

To Begin your Adventure_Mode experience:

• Head to LoreMachine.Wtf on your desktop or download on the Apple Store.

• All LORES are free to explore.

• To build or remix a LORE you must register.

• We are approving registrations on a rolling basis by email for the first few weeks.

• Once registered you can create a LORE by hitting the button at the top of the homepage; or you can remix by clicking the potion button next to any LORE.

• After registration you can generate five free scenes

• Once you are through your first five scenes you can sign up for one of three subscription tiers: $3.99/week, $9.99/month or $99/year. At each tier, you receive 300 generations / month. If you run out, you can buy $5 boosts that give you 100 more generations.

OK that’s the nitty gritty. Here’s an deep-dive demo that takes you inside the experience of building an original LORE.

This is day one of the world’s most interactive storytelling experience. Enjoy!