Upheaval launches Dreamer Portal early access for AI-powered 3D game world creation

Upheaval Games, founded by industry veterans from Blizzard, Tencent, and Unity, announced early access to The Dreamer Portal, a free web-based user interface empowering anyone to design immersive game content with the help of AI.

Upheaval said it can be used to create creatures, items, worlds, and props, from a single prompt. The Dreamer Portal offers a glimpse into a future where creativity is instant, immersive, and playable, said Aaron Moon, head of product at Upheaval, in an interview with GamesBeat.

The Dreamer Portal addresses the gaming industry’s chronic bottlenecks, from stalled projects to constrained innovation, enabling creatives to effortlessly transform voice or text prompts into fully rigged and animated 3D assets directly within their browser. Developers can immediately access the tool by joining Early Access at https://dreamer.upheavalai.com/.

The no-code toolkit converges multiple AI technologies such as Meshy, OpenAI, Tripo, and many more, to slash production costs and timelines while empowering creators to iterate fast and dream big, the company said.

From in-painting edits and prompt enrichment to drag-and-drop art iteration and CSV-driven mass asset generation, it integrates with Unreal Engine, Unity, and seamlessly to many other 3D tools, and stores assets in the cloud for cross-device access. An upcoming marketplace will tie it all together, spotlighting Agentic/AI-controlled games to boost discoverability and monetization for devs pushing interactive storytelling forward.

“What we have been working on over the last couple of years is a platform to really change the way that games are made and also the way that they’re played,” said Moon.

Upheaval believes that games are taking too long to build and they’re costing too much money. They’re trying to come with ways to shorten the process and cut out those costs.

“How do we speed run this?” Moon asked rhetorically. “How do we drop in what Dreamweaver did to HTML coding and web design for games. Rather than using AI in some ways that other people might not like, what we decided to do is take it to the next level.”

If you use prompts to use generative AI to create images, then you should be able to edit those images, paint in them, and drag and drop things into a more automated system that can be brought into the game development process. And that’s what Upheaval is doing, Moon said.

“What I can actually do is I can turn these images and prompts into full 3D models. So just with a click of a button, I can turn them into the 3D meshes. I can turn them into rigged and animated images with another click of the button. This is the kind of speed run we’re going with this,” Moon said.

In the past, editing generative AI images was hit or miss. It was hard to do edits in any automated way, and changes often meant just starting over.

“Studios waste too much time wrestling with rapid-fire AI updates, tech debt, and busted pipelines,” said Jeff Goodsill, CEO of Upheaval Games, in a statement. “We’re delivering a flexible, future-proof layer that sits between your game and the chaotic AI ecosystem, letting you plug in cutting-edge tools and assets without the hassle so you can build bold, innovative titles instead of babysitting fixes.”

With the majority of games failing within three years and hundreds of millions lost to abandoned projects, risk aversion has long choked creativity. Upheaval’s upcoming Agentic AI flips that script, eliminating tasks like scripting character behaviors and instead using agents who generate evolving narratives to free devs for what matters: crafting standout mechanics and stories at more than 10X the speed.

The team has a lot of experience working on a wide variety of titles. Moon himself previously worked at Unity and also was involved with launches of multiplayer games such as Apex Legends, Call of Duty and more.

Moon showed me a demo of how it works.

“Rather than just build 3D assets and images, we’re actually building a fully agentic system. So this piece right here is called the synthetic Nexus,” Moon said. “Every time we build one of these three characters, this is an NPC. It’s got rich meta, it’s got descriptions, personalities, it’s got moralities, mottos, and the list continues all the way up into attributes with scalers. So if I want to drop these characters into a game, I can adjust that scaler so they’re normalized with the other assets that have been dropped into it. So this is already kind of taking into account everything that you would probably build in an MMO or a D&D character sheet.”

In the demo, Moon said the thing that distinguishes the NPCs is memory.

“I’ve got agents and I’ve got a scene in Unrea. What I can actually do is I can drop these things in there, and because they have all of those things, they start to have autonomous behavior. These aren’t just chat bots. So these are actual characters in the game that we built in minutes, going from text to 2D to animated and rigged in Unreal and now they’re conversing with each other,” Moon said. “They know who they are. They know what backstory they have. They have lots and lots of data at their fingertips through the LLMs.”

He added, “In a gaming scenario, you’ve got a shopkeeper and maybe they build axes. And after they run out of inventory, you want them to go into the forest for a day and chop wood and mill it, and then the next day you want them to mine ore and then start smelting it. If you had to program all of those game behaviors, pathing and all of that, it would take tons and tons of time,” Moon said. “And if you’re just going through concept art, right, that’s burning a lot of money. So this system eliminates all this. Everything you’re seeing here is codeless. So there is no pathing, there is none of that. There is simply just memories. So I’m using the power of language to talk to these agents, and they’re able to do live things in game. They continue to learn from me as I interact with them, and it effectively allows us to create an agentic world where it’s a forever MMO. Everything that you do impacts that world.”

Moon said that every time you play this MMO, it’s unique.

“We feel, from a user generated content perspective, this system will allow for is Roblox with high fidelity,” Moon said. “They’ve always wanted that kind of holy grail where players could go in there and just literally create the same quality and fidelity of video game assets that we see in the triple-A space. We’re actually going to be seeing this in AI. So what Upheaval is doing is we’re building a full kit of tools, and we have them in early access already, so that you can actually empower fully agentic AI in run time. And this works with Unity, works with Unreal. We’re partnered with over 18 different AI technologies to make all of these things happen. So in addition to all of the 3D and the text, we can do music, we can do voice.”

To make it really different for the triple-A space, Upheaval has created an on-premises solution, which means it will be able to use Nvidia DGX Spark technology to run local LLMs where all of it happens offline from the internet or on an intranet. The users can control which art and models are being fed into the LLM. That protects the user from intellectual property infringement issues.

“We would call this ‘Ready Player One’ with Westworld controls,” Moon said.

Moon said that in the past couple of years, it was expensive to generate 3D models, as it used a lot of hours of processing and the quality wasn’t there. Now the company can do it in under two minutes thanks to the advances of AI processing, and it is doing it for a cost of pennies, Moon said.

“That is going to continue to accelerate, and it’s going to continue to get better. So the processing power to do this is trivial,” Moon said. “It’s very efficient, very slim. It doesn’t require a lot of processing power to do that.”

The team has eight people, including three who are full-time. Once the company closes its funding round, it expects to boost the numbers to 10 to 15 people.

“As we finish the features in the UI for this tool set, while we’re building this agentic platform to its completion, we’re going to be looking at a publishing sector,” said Moon. “We’ll be publishing games. We’ll have a marketplace, so we’ll use these tools. So think of it like a fully agentic version of Steam. And the idea is that this tool that you see here is a prelude to everything that we’re trying to get to, and we want to give this away. We don’t want it tokenized. We want people paying a whole bunch of money for it. We want to basically give them tools that make this easier, so that we can unblock anybody who wants to build a game from being able to do so regardless of their talent.”

The team built this tech in about seven months, though some of the tech has been in the works for a couple of years.

I asked Moon if this tech would eliminate jobs in game development.

“I was a web designer and programmer about 20 years ago, and I built a small company doing just that. When Dreamweaver hit, I think everybody that had slogged through learning HTML, CSS and PHP, MySQL — all those things — was pretty scared. They were worried that they were going to lose their jobs. Now, my grandparents can write rich text HTML emails, and they don’t even know what a hyperlink is, even though they’re doing it. So what that did is it supercharged that group of people to be able to do so much more. We went to Flash, we went to full video in browser, and we were able to do those things because we didn’t have the kludginess of having to write our own HTML with games.”

He added, “This is, I think, is what AI is doing for us, right? It’s picking up 90% of the work that we have to do to get through the 10% that’s fun.”

The company is starting to do sign-ups for access to the web platform starting today.

After today, the company will continue to polish that UI, and then it will have deeper engagements with those who are using the tool. By the end of 2025 and into 2026, the company will push out its own agentic games as an example of how to use the platform.

As for how the company is setting itself apart, Moon said AI tools are widespread now, but few are really helping developers get rid of the drudge work that stands in the way of agentic gameplay. The size of the world generated depends on storage for things like the number of NPCs or pathing needs.

“When we talk about the size of games this could empower and with streaming engines like UE 5, it’s really just the speed of the Internet and how efficient can you make the data,” Moon said. “If we built something the size of Fortnite, for example, we could drop these agents in pretty much real time.”

And he showed off a video that was essentially doing just that. He said others are still focused on creating things like chat bots. Down the road, Moon believes that agentic tools will take over so we’ll get more sophisticated NPCs, where a “character that you’ve been talking with understands everything that you’ve ever been doing,” Moon said.

He added, “I want people to understand that this is different because of the experience of all of our developers who have so many years of experience. This will empower game development. I think that’s what really sets us apart.”