EDMONTON, Alberta, Sept. 14, 2026 (GLOBE NEWSWIRE) -- Artificial Agency, an AI company pioneering agentic behavior for gaming, today announced that it has integrated its Behavior Engine into Owlchemy Labs’ Dimensional Double Shift, powering an all-new Single Player Mode. The mode brings the game’s signature collaborative multiplayer experience to solo players with a full AI crew of Totally Expendable Multi-dimensional Personnel (T.E.M.P.s) robotic coworkers, each filling a distinct cooperative gameplay role. This is the world’s first commercial game mode built around moment-to-moment collaboration between one human player and multiple AI agents that interpret player intent, coordinate with one another, and adapt as the game unfolds. Artificial Agency’s technology and game-specific models provide the behavioral layer for these interactions and decisions, bringing Owlchemy Labs’ creative vision and gameplay design to life. Single Player Mode is slated to ship in the first half of 2027.
Distinct from classic “bot” implementations in previous single player game modes which respond to a pre-mapped sequence of actions, the T.E.M.P.s interact with the player in a complex, open-ended way that creates more room for player expression and individual choice. The player can speak naturally, and the T.E.M.P.s interpret requests, coordinate with the player and one another, decide how to help, and invoke approved actions within Owlchemy’s defined roles and boundaries to keep the shift moving in a busy setting like a diner. The T.E.M.P.s can also draw on relevant earlier moments, improvise within their roles, and express humor, skepticism, and other human-like personality traits authored by Owlchemy and powered by Artificial Agency’s technology.
“For years, cooperative games have relied on human teammates for communication, coordination, and role fulfillment to provide the most entertaining experience. Artificial Agency’s advances in agentic behavior have shown it’s possible to create rich experiences without compromise,” said Andrew Eiche, CEO at Owlchemy. “By integrating the Behavior Engine into Dimensional Double Shift’s new Single Player Mode, we can preserve the teamwork at the heart of game and make the experience accessible to solo players when real-life friends are not around or in off-hours of the day—all without changing the core mechanics or dynamics of multiplayer. We were able to keep our current pipeline unmodified and use agents to turn your voice into action. Everything else is traditional Owlchemy Labs. That’s a big deal for us from a development perspective and for our players.”
With this integration, Artificial Agency has made significant advancements in its training and model architecture which has unlocked commercial viability for cost-effective deployment at scale in game titles and other applications. The video game industry is bigger than ever as global revenues are expected to reach $300B by 2029, but competition to capture player attention is fierce, with more than 225,000 new games released in 2025 alone. Agentic AI presents one of the most significant emerging opportunities for studios to innovate gameplay and captivate player attention, but high recurring inference costs tied to persistent agents has served an economic challenge to game studios already under budget pressure. At the same time, developers face hurdles ensuring agents are fast and responsive in game settings.
Artificial Agency trained a small, optimized model specifically for Dimensional Double Shift, in combination with its reflex architecture to separate fast, immediate reactions from decisions that benefit from deeper model reasoning and help behavior stay responsive as gameplay changes. The result is dynamic behavior with lower latency and inference costs, making agentic gameplay commercially viable at scale and practical across a broad range of platforms including PCs, mobile, VR, and consoles.
“Three years ago, we founded Artificial Agency on a clear thesis: commercially viable agentic behavior in games requires a game-native approach,” said Brian Tanner, CEO and co-founder of Artificial Agency. “Our work with Owlchemy Labs on Dimensional Double Shift’s Single Player Mode proves it. At the heart of that approach is what we call agent empathy: designing from the agent’s point of view so it can perceive, understand, and act reliably inside the game. By closing the reality gap between what the agent believes and what is actually happening, we can train very small, game-specific models that deliver responsive, adaptive gameplay beyond what scripting can achieve, at a cost developers can ship.”
Artificial Agency’s partnership with Owlchemy Labs is a significant milestone for the company. As the first shipped game built with the Behavior Engine, Dimensional Double Shift’s Single Player Mode offers a category-defining experience, serving as powerful proof of the company’s founding vision for how agentic behavior can rethink the way games are designed and experienced.
To learn more about the Behavior Engine and partnering with Artificial Agency, click here.
About Artificial Agency
Artificial Agency is an AI company pioneering agentic behavior for gaming. Its Behavior Engine trains game-specific models that enable characters and game systems to react, coordinate, and adapt to player actions and changes in game state, while reducing latency and inference costs to make agentic gameplay practical to build and ship at scale. With AI talent from Google DeepMind, gaming veterans from top AAA studios, and backing from Radical Ventures and Toyota Ventures, Artificial Agency is redefining the boundaries of gaming and completely reimagining the player experience.
Media Contact:
artificialagency@launchsquad.com
