AI Game Development Enters Its Agentic Era With Upheaval's Dreamer Portal
Upheaval Games, a new startup formed by industry veterans from Blizzard, Tencent, Unity, and Obsidian, has launched early access to its flagship platform: the Dreamer Portal. It's a no-code, AI-driven tool that allows users conjure fully animated 3D characters, worlds, and game mechanics with nothing but voice or text prompts. While the company positions Dreamer as a kind of creative sandbox, it's the front-end of a much deeper effort to rewrite the architecture of game development.
'We've spent thirty years learning how to do it the hard way,' said Twain Martin, Upheaval's co-founder, CTO, and a veteran of Blizzard, Arcane, Obsidian, and other AAA studios. 'Now we're asking, what happens when AI does it all?'
Enchanted market prompted with Upheaval.
The answer, if Upheaval is right, could redefine the entire game development pipeline. Dreamer is the user-friendly gateway, built for solo creators and small teams, while the real power lies in Nexus, a back-end platform for spawning and managing AI-driven agents, which can best be described as NPCs with memory, goals, and autonomy. These agents can speak and interact with players, and build, script, and even populate game environments on their own, without any prompting at all.
Unlike existing AI tools that require deep technical integrations, Nexus is designed for natural language instruction. 'You can give these agents a job with your voice,' said Aaron Moon, co-founder and Head of Product. 'We're building a world where you don't need a QA pipeline to test every change. The AI handles logic and behavior live, at runtime.'
A 2D image can become a rigged, animated 3D image in seconds.
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Upheaval's soon-to-be-released Nexus platform currently connects with with both Unity and Unreal Engine, generating rigged, animatable 3D assets stored in the cloud for drag-and-drop use. The toolstack supports character generation, dialogue behavior, item crafting, and environment logic. Its proprietary agent engine enables autonomous NPCs to interact with in-game objects, generate items with histories, and adapt behavior based on player input or scene context.
One of the platform's more radical ideas is to treat the game itself as an emergent system that evolves alongside the player. 'Imagine an MMO where every NPC gets older, learns new skills, or changes appearance based on weather or combat,' said Martin. 'That's the 'Forever MMO' we're aiming for—persistent, dynamic, and built on agentic AI.'
The Dreamer Portal, available now via free early access, is just the beginning. It functions as an aggregation layer atop dozens of AI services such as Meshy, Tripo, OpenAI, and others, thus allowing users to rapidly iterate without getting stuck in what Moon calls 'prompting paralysis.' The company plans to introduce a marketplace later this year, enabling creators to monetize agent-based games, assets, and experiences by selling them to other users.
The broader vision goes beyond gaming. Moon says the same tools used to animate a blacksmith in a fantasy world could power simulations for scientists, educators, or even doctors. 'AI can surface patterns in massive datasets that humans would never see,' he said. 'One of our alpha testers is literally using it to help identify T-cell interactions in cancer research.'
Upheaval's Nexus.
Still, the implications for the gaming industry are immediate and disruptive. Moon and Martin are candid about the consequences. 'We're not pretending this won't eliminate jobs,' said Moon. 'But like Dreamweaver or the iPhone camera, it expands who gets to create.'
Martin agrees: 'If ten people can now do the work of a hundred, we'll see more games—but only a few will break through.'
Upheaval's founders are betting that those winners will be built with agents—not scripts. 'We're not building another asset farm,' said Moon. 'We're building a world that builds itself.'
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