Meet the Developer
Outdoor Devs is an independent game studio based in Ottawa, Canada, exploring the intersection of AI and interactive entertainment.
About Outdoor Devs
Outdoor Devs is an independent developer with over 40 years of software development experience, now specializing in AI development and conversational AI. Based in Ottawa, Canada, Outdoor Devs builds tools and games that explore what happens when artificial intelligence becomes a first-class participant in interactive experiences.
Shouldermen started as an experiment: what if you could have a real conversation with a game character — not through scripted dialog trees, but through genuine, unscripted AI-generated dialog? What if the player's voice was the controller, and every interaction was unique?
That experiment became a full game. Shouldermen combines GPT-5 for dynamic dialog generation, Eleven Labs for custom character voices, and Deepgram for speech recognition to create something genuinely new — a game where you talk your way through puzzles by having real conversations with AI characters.
The Vision
Conversational AI as Gameplay
Most games use AI as a tool behind the scenes — controlling enemy behavior, generating terrain, or managing difficulty. Shouldermen puts AI front and center as the gameplay itself. The conversation is the game.
This creates something fundamentally different from traditional game design. There are no scripted paths. No dialog trees. Every conversation is emergent, shaped by what the player says and how the AI characters respond.
Why Voice Matters
Text input works, but voice changes the experience entirely. Speaking out loud to a character who speaks back creates a sense of presence and immersion that typing can't match. It feels less like playing a game and more like having a conversation.
Voice-controlled gaming is still in its early days, and Outdoor Devs believes it represents a significant frontier for interactive entertainment — especially combined with the conversational capabilities of modern AI models.
Other Projects by Outdoor Devs
Shouldermen is one of several projects exploring AI and interactive technology.
LiveTranslate.live
Real-time translation tool powered by AI, designed for live conversations across language barriers.
Brain Fu
An AI-powered brain training application that adapts to the user's cognitive patterns and learning style.
Dandelopia
A creative project exploring generative AI in interactive storytelling and world-building.
LatestRelayer
A tool for curating and relaying the latest developments in AI and technology news.