For the last several months, I’ve been neck-deep in a strange and wonderful hybrid of software engineering, artificial intelligence, and fantasy world-building. What started as “let’s see if I can make one decent AI character” turned into an entire ecosystem of fine-tuned models, memory systems, image pipelines, game engines, and deployment infrastructure.
And instead of hiding that process behind polished demos, I documented the entire mess in public.
That became a four-part engineering series on Medium — covering how I build original AI-powered NPCs from concept to fully deployed, memory-enabled, API-driven personalities.
This isn’t prompt-tinkering.
This is systems engineering for synthetic characters.
What the Series Covers
Each article tackles a critical layer of the pipeline:
Part 1 – Personality Engineering & Seed Architecture
Part 2 – Seed Generation & Situational Intelligence
Part 3 – Response Generation & Dialogue Engineering
Part 4 – Fine-Tuning, Deployment & Forging the NPC Brain
This series feeds directly into my larger project: Tharendell, a living fantasy world powered by:
- AI NPCs with memory
- A custom RPG rules-engine (Stormforge)
- A resurrected 1990s style BBS (Written from scratch in C#)
- Generative art pipelines
- And a Dungeon Master AI that actually understands mechanics
Yeah … We’re just getting started!