Distil-NPC: a family of models for non-playable characters in games
we finetuned Google's Gemma 270m (and 1b) small language models specialized in having conversations as non-playable characters (NPC) found in various video games. Our goal is to enhance the experience of interacting in NPSs in games by enabling natural language as means of communication (instead of single-choice dialog options).
Distil-NPC: a family of models for non-playable characters in games launched on October 23, 2025 with 6 votes and more than 75% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
What it does
Contribute to distil-labs/Distil-NPCs development by creating an account on GitHub.
We trained and released a small family of small language models (SLMs) specialised for having conversations with players of video games from the perspective of a non-playable character (NPC). This highlights one of the many exciting possibilities SLMs continue to demonstrate. The models were trained using a closed-book QA setup, where the aim is to embed new knowledge into the models. The source data consisted of biographies of 81 characters and a large test set of potential questions (along with the corresponding answers) that could be asked to the characters. This allows a much more natural interaction with NPCs than is typically possible, which could be an exciting innovation for gaming.…from github.com
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