Recently, a demo for a game called "Ing" has garnered attention since its release.
This title was developed by Shanghai Youyi Technology. Its founder, Ding Shenghao, previously worked at miHoYo, where he personally modified the industry-leading cloud gaming servers—an achievement that led to his exceptional early hiring even before he graduated, earning him the nickname "Little Genius" within the company.
In May 2023, after leaving Mihoyo, Ding Shenghao leased an office building across the street from the company and officially established Youyi Technology. In just one year, the startup secured several rounds of funding from Genkirakira L.P. and Sequoia Capital China.
The newly launched *Ingle* is the first title developed by the Youyi team using its proprietary AI narrative engine. It’s no wonder that investors are so enthusiastic about it: Take Genki Capital, for example—its lead partner, Changyou Technology, has long been deeply involved in the AI gaming sector, making the partnership with Youyi a perfect match.
Earlier, at Youyi’s office, I had a three-hour conversation with Ding Shenghao, the founder of Chaguan. At a time when AI games are increasingly becoming a marketing gimmick for investors, both the innovative gameplay of *Yingge* and Ding Shenghao’s technical vision really caught my attention.
01
A CRPG that gives players true freedom of choice
(This section contains minor spoilers. If you don’t want to spoil the game experience, you may skip to the second section.)
Set in a sci-fi world plagued by extreme weather, *Ingre* follows a player who leads their sick younger sister on an adventure to find a cure or uncover more secrets.
The game features two gameplay modes: in one, players advance the story and gather clues through conversations with various characters; in the other, they roll dice to determine the course of events.
From the very beginning of the design process, the team wanted the game to break free from the constraints of a linear narrative, much like open-world titles. The game features over 2,000 interwoven storylines, and every action and decision players make can trigger a chain reaction.
In the demo chapter now available, players will face several key decisions: whether to help the mother of a deceased child uncover the truth, and whether to stop the battery theft taking place at the hospital.
One possible complete story branch might be: If you catch the culprit in the act during the battery theft, you might discover that Li Bao’s death was not caused by a simple power outage but was linked to another electricity theft incident, potentially exposing Nurse Ah Xin’s scheme to steal electricity.Later, if you encounter Li Bao’s mother while processing your sister’s discharge paperwork and reveal this information to her—while also granting her access to the hospital—she might kill Ah Xin.
But if we steal the batteries needed for the crime right from the start, Ah Xin—who was planning to steal electricity—will notice something amiss, and the power outage won’t be triggered; or if we don’t tell Li Bao’s mother, Ah Xin will track us down once he finds out everything, leading to a confrontation; or if we don’t steal the batteries and manage to avoid the entire plot, we’ll be able to take our little sister home from the hospital as planned… Even if we try to change what’s already happened by rewinding to the previous day, it will unlock a completely different story branch.
Therefore, in *Inger*, there are no predetermined paths to follow, nor are there any so-called "death endings." Players with different personalities will experience different story branches, and even if the same player replays the game, it’s unlikely they’ll unlock the exact same storyline, as many branches are determined by AI, offering a high degree of freedom.
While there are multiple choices, the plot doesn’t veer off course. No matter what storylines players experience—even if they follow entirely different paths—the game will ultimately lead to one of the dozen or so predetermined endings. Take Li Bao’s cause of death, for example: even if players don’t uncover the hospital’s conspiracy firsthand, they can still learn the truth through conversations with Xiao Shu. “It’s a lot like playing pool: the beginning and the end are the same, but the way each player plays in between creates a unique outcome,” a Yuzhi staff member described in an interview.
02
An AI game engine designed for narrative-driven games
"Ink" is an AI-driven narrative CRPG, but when actually playing the game, you’ll hardly notice the AI at work.
“Where’s the AI in this game?” I asked Ding Shenghao, the founder, when I first met him at Youyi’s office. The question got him excited. He said that when players ask this, it’s the best compliment the game could receive, because from the very beginning, they hadn’t set out to create a mere “AI game” focused solely on chatting.
In 2022, the release of ChatGPT sparked a wave of enthusiasm for AI-powered tabletop role-playing games, with many players using ChatGPT to generate prompts for their campaigns. At the time, Ding Shenghao, a seasoned tabletop role-playing enthusiast, was also exploring how AI could be integrated into the genre to create engaging gameplay. However, he realized that relying solely on prompts to generate scenarios could easily lead to unintended outcomes, so he embarked on a somewhat different technical path.
Essentially, Ding Shenghao has built an AI game engine designed to support narrative-driven games. It is a system capable of supporting story frameworks, game assets, animations, and facial expressions, allowing players to experience a level of immersion in single-player games that closely resembles that of a live-action role-playing game.
The development of this system stems from his observations and research into narrative-driven games. Long ago, he noticed that while traditional RPGs appear to give players freedom of choice, there is often only one true path; whenever you choose a different branch, the game either loops you back to the main path or causes your character to die along the way.
More complex RPGs often employ a "Branch and Bottleneck" structure. Within each branch, choices interact with one another, and the storylines are interconnected in a flexible manner, giving players the freedom to explore the story as they wish: whether they tackle one path first and then another, their decisions will influence the narrative. At the same time, the main storyline is eventually brought back together through strategically designed "bottlenecks."
This model enables true freedom in RPG games. During his research, Ding Shenghao discovered that, with previous technologies, implementing "Branch and Bottlenecks" was far from straightforward. A game called *80 DAYS* even invented a programming language specifically for this purpose and utilized the concept of "Storylets."
The core logic of Storylet is to break down traditional linear long stories into countless modular "mini-stories."In *80 DAYS*, each story is structured in three parts: the preconditions that trigger the story; in-story conditions that affect dialogue—for example, in a kitchen conversation, what is said if the fridge is empty versus if it is not; and the output of these dialogues, which creates conditions that influence other stories.
“This three-part structure is easier to automate, and it loosens the constraints between scenes, allowing writers to craft more complex stories.“Ding Shenghao said that while Storylet offers a solution, there are still unresolved issues: on the one hand, such complex narrative threads are virtually impossible to test, and stories often reach dead ends without the writers even realizing it; on the other hand, to ensure player immersion within the story, any changes the player makes should be reflected in the game—the level of immersion achievable through manual intervention alone is limited.”
Ding Shenghao solved both of these problems using AI technology and applied them to *Yingge*. First, he realized that the inability to test the system stemmed from the sheer number of “conditions and outputs” that were difficult to verify; however, when these “conditions and outputs” met certain criteria, they could be expressed using first-order logic. Building on this, verification could be achieved by introducing an automated reasoning and proof system. He therefore developed a system based on this automated reasoning and proof system within the narrative script editor.During the development of *Ink*, screenwriters no longer had to wait until the entire story was written to discover logical inconsistencies; instead, they could identify and resolve these issues as they wrote within the editor.
Secondly, he found that it was crucial to respond to the player’s every action within the story branches. However, the workload involved in fine-tuning the text based on the player’s choices—or even the order in which those choices were made—was enormous.In many cases, only minor dialogue adjustments were needed, so he replaced the parts that would have required manual writing with AI. In their editor, writers only need to outline the basic script logic, and the engine can then expand on that content. This engine boosted their scriptwriting efficiency by 20 times, allowing them to complete the script framework in just two or three months.
In *Ing*, the application of AI is actually embedded in every choice the player makes. The fact that it’s difficult to detect during gameplay is a result of Ding Shenghao’s ingenuity. He realized that certain plot elements aren’t necessarily influenced by all conditions. Therefore, while he used open-source models for AI text generation, he modified how those models operate.Through script constraints, the engine generates syntactic constraints for the LLM (Large Language Model) by injecting them into the LLM’s sampling function. This enables deterministic generation during gameplay based on the branches and assets that can be scheduled within the game. For example, during the nightly conversation with the younger sister, the day ends as soon as the player expresses the intention “I’m tired.”
As a result of the refinement, the modified model now retrieves only specific stories when generating text and recalling memories. With this narrowed scope, accuracy has improved, allowing options to be generated in just a few dozen milliseconds.Ding Shenghao explained that the modified model allows screenwriters to integrate AI at any time and in any context: they can choose to use AI when needed while ensuring they can intervene in the story whenever they prefer not to rely on AI. Since the AI’s generation points are predictable, by the time players pause to read and consider an option, the AI has already generated the subsequent dialogue and options in advance, making it difficult for players to detect the AI’s involvement.
03
Priced to cover costs, a fully purchased AI game
In terms of cost, the most significant benefit of Ding Shenghao’s team’s AI game narrative engine is that it keeps computing costs under control.
Although the cost of computing power is gradually declining, for AI games with substantial computing expenses, this cost continues to slow down their launch.
These AI games generally adopt a "one-time purchase plus subscription" payment model; after purchasing the game, players must pay additional fees to access more extensive story content. Ding Shenghao noted, however, that *Ing* allows players to experience the full content with virtually no additional payments, and the cost of a single purchase covers their computing costs.
In fact, this AI-driven narrative engine isn’t limited to *Inger* alone. The system Ding Shenghao has developed can also be applied to other narrative-driven games.
At the far end of the conference room where we met, there was equipment for the newly launched interactive cinematic game *Looking Northward*, and Youyi’s script editor also saved the team time that would otherwise have been spent manually checking the narrative logic during post-production, thereby streamlining the process.
It is clear that, beyond the game *Inger*, this AI narrative game engine itself holds immense universal commercial value.
To be honest, based on the demo, *Ing* is a pretty enjoyable game: with its smooth reading experience, fluid dialogue, and diverse story paths, once you’ve played through it once, you’ll want to keep exploring to see what different storylines you can unlock.
In *Ink*, the creative team also has their own message to convey; through crafting this story, they aim to explore the relationship between humanity, nature, and technological advancement.
This stems from founder Ding Shenghao’s tastes in reading and gaming. As a tech expert and seasoned gamer, he doesn’t want technical showmanship to overshadow the gameplay itself. As he puts it, “An AI game must first and foremost be a game; just because it uses AI doesn’t mean it should stop feeling like a game.”
04
Can a team of 10 take on the tech giants?
It’s hard to see the figure of a businessman in Ding Shenghao, who talks endlessly about technology.
When I first met him at the Youyi office in Shanghai, I had a hard time connecting the young man with long hair in his early twenties standing before me to the genius founder I’d heard so much about. I greeted him by calling him “President Ding,” and he laughed and said, “I was just wondering who President Ding was.”
The story most people are familiar with is that he began teaching himself to code in elementary school and had already established himself as a recognized tech guru in the open-source community by the time he was in high school.
While interning at miHoYo during his junior year, he was hired on a special basis because the cloud gaming demo he created in just two weeks had already reached the highest standards in the industry at the time. His close friend Lao Jin once remarked that Ding Shenghao was one of the smartest people he had ever met.
In fact, when he’s not talking about technology, this tech genius has quite a sense of humor. He laughed as he recounted a recent experience at a hotel: When the front desk clerk saw him with his long hair, they asked, “Haven’t you checked in before?” He replied, “No, I haven’t.” The clerk said, “Sorry, we’ve had too many men with long hair checking in lately.”
When asked about the company’s “four days on, three days off” work schedule, he responded quite casually: “I’ve noticed that Fridays are usually packed with endless meetings. Since we’re a small team and see each other every day, we don’t really need to hold meetings—it’s better to just let everyone get some proper rest.”
Currently, Youyi has a team of over 10 people, most of whom are former colleagues of Ding Shenghao from miHoYo, while others are friends he met through his role-playing group. This group of people, who share similar experiences or interests, often come up with interesting stories when they get together.
Their office has a ping-pong table and three bicycles that belong to the two of them; one of them even sold a bicycle to the other.
Despite the company’s seemingly laid-back atmosphere, it yielded remarkable efficiency. The script framework was put together in just two weeks. Almost every member of the team was a jack-of-all-trades; even the writers and programmers could handle operations tasks.
To make commuting easier for her former colleagues at miHoYo, Yuzhi specifically chose an office location directly across the street from miHoYo, where she can see the lights of her old workplace just across the road.During casual chats, they sometimes reminisce about Mihoyo’s legendary past—a small team of just a few dozen people who, driven by sheer determination, carved out a niche for themselves among the giants of the industry and eventually became a “phenomenon” in the gaming world. Now, can their own team of about ten people follow in their predecessors’ footsteps and become the new contender bold enough to challenge “Mihoyo”?
原创文章，作者：游茶妹儿，禁止转载：https://youxichaguan.com/en/archives/194629
