NPCs that remember: how memory and factions actually work

“NPCs that remember” is the single line we lead the whole project with, so it’s worth being precise about what that actually means under the hood — because “remember” is doing a lot of work in that sentence, and it’s not just a longer context window.

Two tiers, not one

Every NPC carries two distinct kinds of memory:

• Short-term memory — the conversation happening right now, the fight in progress, the deal that hasn’t closed yet. This is fast, local to the current scene, and doesn’t need to survive a session boundary.
• Long-term memory — what the world actually knows about you once a session ends: your deeds, your debts, your reputation. This is what persists, and it’s what makes stealing from a merchant in session one mean something in session five.

The bridge between the two is session summarization: rather than replaying an entire chat log into every future prompt (expensive, and it degrades fast as history grows), completed sessions get compressed into durable facts that feed back into the world state and into how NPCs are addressed and referenced going forward.

Factions aren’t a lookup table

Reputation in Aikami isn’t a single number tracked against your character. Factions are generated per playthrough — each with its own beliefs, alliances, and grudges — and they’re aware of each other. Help one group and, depending on who they talk to and who they’re rivals with, their enemies can find out too. That’s a narrative director’s job as much as a data structure’s: deciding not just what happened, but who plausibly hears about it and how they react.

Choices that actually branch

None of this matters if the story underneath is fixed. Dialogue and quests in Aikami aren’t pre-written trees — the AI Game Master builds them as you play, using the character sheets, the memory state, and the faction standings as constraints. Two players who start in the same tavern, talking to the same NPC, can walk away with completely different relationships to that world, because the inputs to the next scene are genuinely different by the time they get there.

Where this is headed

Memory and factions are “Now/Next” on our roadmap — the core loop works today, and cross-chat memory, AI-generated lorebooks, and richer relationship graphs are the next layer we’re building on top of it. If you want to see where that’s headed in more detail, the feature specs are public, same as everything else.