// HACKER NEWS — CYBERSECURITY
I built a low-latency AI companion that plays Skyrim with me
A real-time intelligent gaming companion that actually plays alongside you. World agency, local inference, persistent plans, and an AI character designed to create a striking emotional experience.
(Currently running in Skyrim, but by design pluggable anywhere, standalone too)
Simple: Let's build a super-charged next-level gaming companion that actually feels good.
There are already multiple frameworks that let LLMs control NPC dialogue. They are fantastic for role-playing and staying in character, but they have two recurring problems: weak world agency and latency. Good at talking but far less reliable at performing actions and terrible at complex instruction sets. You may have also noticed how popular AI NPC demos often cut between the player speaking and the AI replying, trying to mask latency. Can we do better?
Basically: a single-player game where you are not playing alone.
Varkos can handle commands that extend beyond one immediate action. Plans can wait for events, preserve targets between steps, monitor progress and repair or stop when world state changes. Nothing is pre-scripted.
Varkos receives a conditional instruction involving the next arrow. He registers the future trigger instead of acting immediately, waits for the correlated projectile impact and then continues the plan.
“I want you to wait here and I’m gonna go over there. Once you see the signal, the signal is going to be an arrow I fire up in the sky, I want you to pick up this potion and come and bring it to me. Okay?”
Varkos can search the grounded world state for a requested item, identify where it is and respond using what is actually present in the game.
Varkos picks up a different sword and brings it to us. We tell him that’s not the one, then he offers to be on the lookout.
Hide-and-seek is not a single API call. It becomes a persistent goal with movement, waiting, monitoring and completion conditions.