April Update: GDC & Playroom AI Engine

GDC & Playroom AI Engine

Tabish Ahmed
Tabish Ahmed

April 3, 2023

It's been a whirlwind of a month here with GDC and Demo events keeping us on our toes. Yet we still have major updates to share as we were able to hit our projected milestones.
Let's start with March launches:

🚂 Asset Layer

(soft launch)

Our goal is to simplify the process of casual game making. Visuals happen to be the part that takes 30% of the development time. To enable the generation of AI assets in our Editor such as backgrounds, objects, cards, sprites, etc., we completed our proprietary AI layer ‘Trainengine'.

Trainengine.ai (opens in a new tab) is also available as a standalone playground which will give us the opportunity to learn, acquire users and build a community. This is great as we can introduce more game-making tools to them in the coming weeks.

🕹️ Fax!

(early access)

We also launched another experimental community game called Fax-Fact or Fake (opens in a new tab)! The game is 70% supercharged by AI (content, voice, asset), 20% enabled by Playroom SDK (gameplay) and 10% by creator's creativity.

We observed that games when played with the community leads to a cohort that retains longer. Still not the best numbers due to the limited nature of the game content, but this insight has given us a direction to further refine our strategy.

GDC

Presenting Playroom Demo at AI meetup along with Rosebud, Resemble and other genAI founders.

GDC: Themes of Discussion

#1 AI to change workflows

Our goal with building creative tools is to simplify game making. Rather than introducing a plugin for Unity and claiming to have improved the process by a certain percentage, what gets us excited is that AI will open up new ways of thinking and will lead to streamlined game creation processes. 

This will not only benefit casual game makers but will also bring in new users who have always wanted to express their creativity through game but lacked the means to do so. The accessibility of these tools will be a game-changer.

#2 Playroom game value

Playroom's goal is to be synonymous with community and couch games. Our tools will enable every game by ‘Default' to be multiplayer. These will be simple casual party games to play with your Family, Twitch community and with your Discord friends. As gamers ourselves, we know the value of playing with friends and we want to amplify that in every game.