AI Town

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Open-source starter kit for a virtual town where AI characters live and chat

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AI Town

What it is

AI Town is an open-source starter kit, released by the a16z infrastructure team in 2023, for building a simulated town where AI-driven characters live, chat and socialize. It is inspired by the Smallville generative agents research from Stanford and Google. Characters hold conversations, remember past interactions and build relationships that shape their behavior. The project uses Convex for its game engine, database and vector search, runs a local model through Ollama by default, and can be pointed at cloud models that use an OpenAI-compatible API. Developers clone the repository, customize characters and the map, and deploy their own version. A live demo is hosted on Convex.

Key features

AI characters with memory and relationships
Customizable characters and map
Local models via Ollama or cloud APIs
MIT license for reuse

What we liked

+ Free and open source
+ Good foundation for agent simulation experiments
+ Can run fully on a local machine

Worth noting

· Requires developer setup to customize
· Model and hosting costs fall on you at scale

Editor's notes

More context from AI BirdView

Watching AI characters wander a pixel-art town and strike up their own conversations is oddly captivating, and AI Town makes that experience something any developer can build on. Instead of a closed demo, it offers the full codebase under a permissive license, which has made it a popular base for agent simulation experiments.

Characters act on their own, holding conversations, remembering interactions and forming relationships over time.
The design follows the generative agents idea popularized by the Smallville research from Stanford and Google.
Convex handles game state, the database and vector search in one backend.
By default it runs a local model through Ollama, and it can also use cloud models with an OpenAI-compatible API.
The MIT license lets you modify, extend and deploy your own town for games, research or teaching.

AI Town is best for developers, researchers and hobbyist game makers who want a working foundation for multi-agent simulations rather than building one from scratch. A practical tip: try the hosted demo first to see how the characters behave, then start your own version locally with a small model so you can experiment with character prompts before paying for cloud inference.