The Future of Game Development with AI: Insights from Cosmic Lounge

The following is a summary of the main points from Tomi Huttula , Co-Founder and CEO of Cosmic Lounge's talk at Think Games Istanbul.

Founded in 2022 by a veteran team with an average of 15 years of experience at major gaming studios such as Seriously, King, and Rovio, Cosmic Lounge has strategically incorporated AI into the very fabric of its operations.?

Their extensive experience in the industry has given them insight into game development's specific challenges and opportunities.

This understanding led them to create custom AI tools perfectly suited to their processes, allowing them to automate tasks efficiently and add significant value with AI, beyond just integrating it into existing workflows.

Puzzle Engine

Cosmic Lounge's in-house technology, the AI-powered Puzzle Engine, offers a no-code toolkit for creating and market-testing a wide array of core game and marketing minigame designs.

This feature enables the team to rapidly identify new, promising puzzle genres and become pioneers in developing games within these categories.?

When moving into the operations phase, Cosmic Lounge leverages this AI-driven production line to produce levels and LiveOps content up to ten times faster.

In their approach to using AI in game development, Cosmic Lounge adheres to three key principles:

1. The Ability to Add/Remove AI Models

Cosmic Lounge acquires AI models from partners and customizes them to suit their game development requirements, with a particular focus on the application layer. This enables rapid adaptation to the ever-changing AI landscape and regulatory shifts, ensuring they remain competitive in game development.

2. Game Architecture and Machine Learning

Cosmic Lounge innovates in the puzzle game market by deeply integrating AI into their development. Unlike the traditional focus on level data configuration, Cosmic Lounge applies AI to understand and optimize not just levels but also the game's core mechanics, such as match rules and player interactions.

3. Embedded Workflows for AI Use

Cosmic Lounge prioritizes simplifying AI use across its teams, focusing on making the technology accessible to non-engineers like level designers and artists. By designing end-to-end workflows within the Puzzle Engine, the company ensures that these team members can utilize AI without getting bogged down by its complexity.

Practical AI Use Cases in Game Development

AI for Prototyping Game Ideas

One of the standout contributions of AI technology in game development is its capacity to significantly streamline the prototyping phase.?

Cosmic Lounge's Puzzle Engine allows their game designers to effortlessly generate and test new game concepts without the immediate need for artists or engineers.?

This capability not only accelerates the prototype creation process but also democratizes game development, enabling designers to bring their imaginative ideas to life with unprecedented speed and efficiency.

AI in Game Art Production

Beyond prototyping, AI significantly aids in exploring and iterating art concepts, allowing the art team to focus on finalizing art instead of spending time on placeholder art.

AI is already effective at producing high-quality backgrounds for mobile games, showcasing its capability to generate a wide range of ideas and visual assets quickly. benefits.?

Designing a well-thought-out art production pipeline can harness AI's advantages, with one artist noting that about 70% of the work was completed by AI.

AI in Level Production

The challenge of producing a large number of levels for casual puzzle games is addressed by AI-assisted level evaluation and generation, improving productivity and quality.

AI helps in pre-testing levels, providing valuable feedback for designers and enabling quicker iterations and optimizations.

Custom tuning AI models for specific tasks like level generation, along with procedural automation, enhances the efficiency of creating engaging game content.

Incorporating player data and performance metrics into AI analysis allows for a deeper understanding of level engagement, helping to tailor content for better monetization and player retention.

AI in Marketing and Mini-Games

AI extends its utility to marketing, particularly in generating mini-game levels and automated gameplay recordings for use in advertisements.

This approach offers a more authentic advertising strategy by allowing the inclusion of actual gameplay mini-games within the main game, as opposed to displaying misleading ad creatives.

Analyzing player interaction data with mini-games can inform future creative processes, enabling the discovery of new and effective mini-game concepts for user acquisition.

Below is a video created with the help of Puzzle Engine:

Today's Insights ??

A new US government-commissioned report claims that AI poses a just-a-tiny-bit-terrifying extinction-level threat to humanity:

“Current frontier AI development poses urgent and growing risks to national security.? The rise of advanced AI and AGI [artificial general intelligence] has the potential to destabilize global security in ways reminiscent of the introduction of nuclear weapons.”?

Mind-Blowing News ??

• A win for character design: Midjourney’s newest feature allows you to generate consistent characters across AI images.
• Companies lacking the same resources as tech giants like Meta and Google are finding it hard to woo AI talent.
• Midjourney has banned Stability AI employees from their plaform after the rival company allegedly caused a 24-hour system outage.?

Let’s see what next week will bring, stay tuned (and subscribe)!