Guy Gadney & Harry Holmwood On Baking Omelettes And AI Into Your Game Worlds

[Music] hello world I'm your host for this wrap of some of the best talks and coolest speakers at PG connects London the global games conference this time around I catch up with two speakers during the event who were part of the standing room only AI track of talks and you will find out why if you listen in because we welcome guy gadney co-founder and CEO of Charisma we've had him on the show before there's a reason why we have them on again and Harry holwood CEO of magic cave so listen learn and love this episode just as I [Music] do guy it's fantastic because here we are it's almost a year to the day since you launched that amazing game that we talked about on Pocket Gamer on the

podcast it's a great show great track a lot of ideas how are you digesting this well I think the show here looks like it's going to break records so that's really exciting among the number of people here I think uh everything I've seen so far is that AI is infusing throughout everything it's like the topical conversation as it has been for the last 12 months anyway uh really since chat GPT at the end of 2022 so we're excited you know the work we've been doing I think is starting to be recognized the uh the philosophies we put into the technology we're doing is starting to be recognized um and the impact of it on the games industry is starting to really be felt I think this year which is which is a good place good place to be it's also a deeper thought about AI it's thinking about it's great to be creative which you obviously were when we were chatting before with Electric Sheep which is an amazing concept because it will never be there again when you view it that's it this is

the reality that it's that's the first and last time you'll experience it like that totally and I think I think you know what that's one of the key things on the panel I was just I was just talking on uh that I think is going to be the key for 2024 and 2025 is when people start to use AI uh they evolve it from being something that is accelerating their pipeline what they currently do whether it's creating a background asset or creating a character whatever into real time in other words where that world or those characters or the dialogue is being generated uh with input from the player in real time and that's what we did with project Electric Sheep was to say tell it your dream and will generate the you know the buildings the weather system um the characters all of this in real time and that it changes the way you look at it because I think there is a an element then of of Designing not for every

potential option every potential nook and cranny that exists in a game and more just setting the rules for the game saying okay now uh with a little bit of improvisation from AI what can we do what how can we make that so it's Unique to you unique to you as a player when it becomes that fundamental to the game then you start to have this conversation that I'm hearing a lot as well as to well what do you do is it a bit on top of the concept or do you start to literally bake AI in from the start how are you or how should a company be designing for AI well you you me you mentioned baking and and and we we we we went off on a tangent on the panel a little bit about about cooking and all of this in the sense that you're right you can you can so it's like cooking with eggs either you sort of use as a glaze on something you're already making or you're making an omelet and I think the key for me is that we uh with everything to to do with

AI right now it's just about thinking about it it's about pausing for a second saying why do I want to do this is it going to make the game better is it going to make uh our players like it more is it going to make it more unique um ethically am I doing the right thing am I not just leaping in too fast because I think there is a um 20123 was very much a leap in get your feet wet and now we need to I think 20 24 is a moment of reflection as laws start to come in as the issues start to arise on it and the people who properly think about it uh I think will we'll will'll survive and they're the ones will have the successes and we are starting to think more deeply about it because the question is more and more and in the case of your own game as well with Electric Sheep you know I don't want to understand only what is it and where did you get your inspiration from I want to know what were the prompts what made this possible and it's and

having your own data set I'm hearing absolutely essential is it that way what do games companies need to understand as a fundamental must as they get more and more involved in 2024 it's almost like own your data record your prompts be ready to show where you got your ideas yeah I mean very much all of those you just said I um and again it goes back to just thinking to to to having someone in the organization that knows the AI landscape knows what the mechanisms of AI are what the Foundation Technology is what the content that is used to train it is um and then what content is used to fine-tune it to very different processes and uh and understanding it a little bit more and and I think that's where we're going to start to see some real Innovations this as as people understand the new mechanisms that exist what can they do with it you know that's exciting so I think there's going to be a a sort of almost like a next creative um

uh I don't know uh chapter that that will come through in 24 and 25 as people start to get to grips with these tools these creative tools and and use them for their games so you know I am enthusiastic I love this that's why I came to you and said guy we need to chat because you're you're inspiring but it is going to be a Minefield in 2024 as well in a lot of ways 2024 is when certain uh there's almost like an analogy the water's receding and we're starting to see what was on the floor of the surface you know after the um the Innovations in 23 uh there was a lot of hype in 22 and 23 about this a lot of overinflated valuations uh those are pulling back and um and I think you know 23 again was it was there was a lot of investment around found Foundation models in in technology Foundation Technology my sense is that 24 will be more around the application layer on top that sits on top of of AI um and and you know there are mindfields but but like uh you know anyone who's

walking through a Minefield the first thing to do is again look Don't just run across and O um think about it a little bit more and uh and and and like I saying I think there's a the the angle of looking and thinking about why you would want to do it and how it's going to make a better game and how it may revolutionize your your your entertainment experience is probably the best one to do keep it keep it fun keep it fun but be aware also of the shifting Sands you know and you say keep it fun but it's also a business and uh and you went through quite a lot to launch Electric Sheep I mean you nearly just nearly didn't make it and then you had to switch your thoughts around where to launch it what are your what's a little bit of advice maybe to developers who are saying yes I really want to do this I am prepared guy has prepared me with his advice I'm ready to grasp it but there are going to be some issues how to handle them how to anticipate them well I think you're you're dead right that

when we were when we were working this space very early on there were no guidelines there were no people we could contact in in valve and in Epic who uh who understood exactly what their strategy was what their policy was and could guarantee that we were be able to launch an AI driven game on their platform um that has changed and I think the market is now more stable you know uh my first top tip would be engage with that platform that you want to Launch it onto uh or the publisher you're working with and understand what their guidelines are because you're going to need to make sure that you conform to those um and the last thing you want is to finish a game be ready for launch and then discover that something's you know infringing a particular data set copyright requirements or whatever um I think there is a there is a very fast catch up that's being played by governments by Publishers by Technologies to start to put in place Frameworks around the world but as we

talked a little bit about on the panel every country has different laws so what is right for for the UK may not be right for the US which may not be right for Europe or the Middle East or Asia or whatever so I think there is a um uh again it goes back to to to just understanding and do a little bit of research about where you're going to put your your title and how it comes to life um I mean we are we're barely a year in we're barely a year year in and look how far we've come and I my my sense always is that if you're looking ahead to 2030 you know really only six years away where we are now we're only probably about 2% of where we're going to be in 2030 we're just at the beginning of the journey so there's so much more to keep across but for the creatives out there and indeed the business strategists I think I think just to know where you want to head what your vision is hold that and don't let it be diluted by

bright shiny things don't be distracted by the bright shiny things hold what the idea is whether it's a business strategy or whether it's uh or whether it's a a creative concept and then um and then then question why why you're using AI as part of it maybe better but you may decide not to and that's also fine now I know why I said yes guys there have to go up and meet him in person for real you are a Pioneer for me really am I'm I'm a bit honestly bit of a fan and love to have your thoughts in closing on what has you very excited either what's in your own pipeline or what you've been hearing about you know there's got to be some great title something I was hearing a lot about getting into narrative and Ai and narrative character music Sky a limit what are you excited about guy well I think it for me it's it's always been Story how do you tell a

story and we've heard a little bit today already from people who are saying they want to look at chat GPT and how it can create a story um my advice at the moment is try it because it does not work it's a it's not a good story story is a craft it's an artwork and I think it's very much the way in which I was I was saying earlier on about deploying it in certain areas you know AI is very good at improvisation you know to improv something where like the spine of the story here is that I was on a panel at Pocket Gamer connect the Improv is that you and I met and are now doing this interview so I'm now talking about something else those improv moments um I think are where AI can really fundamentally change the form The Art of Storytelling so I think what we'll see is that is the growth of characters again in games um emotional characters games that really make us feel things uh and also games and AI starting to

feed into other media into film into TV into literature all of the other things um and all of those Industries outside of the video games at the moment are deep deep deep in conversation about the impact of it it's not just games you know I mean we've seen the writer strike we've seen um actor strike in in the US in 20123 uh those issues you know that strike has been resolved but the issues are still l so there's more still more work to be done but excite really exciting I think to see the application of creativity to AI not AI to creativity but creativity to AI That's the key that's where we as humans are best and the moment that starts to happen I think we're going to see some just astonishingly cool stuff how can that be a bad thing you've got us excited creativity to AI it puts us back in control it's a very good feeling and guy I have to say well we worth it I'm so

glad we could connect at Pocket Gamer connect how about that no pun no pun intended thanks so much thank [Music] you Harry I had to catch up with you because your talk was like sitting literally in a Pew no one was leaving everyone was sitting very well behaved and everyone was absorbing it like a sponge so tell me first of all magic cave a little bit about it and a little bit about the how that connect and inspires you for your talk cool well thank you um yeah I'm really pleased to to be here um so magic cave is a company that's set up to build what we call a digital hobby so kind of like a Dungeons and Dragons Warhammer that kind of thing but but digital so with digital dice digital characters tiles digital tiles that you can build worlds out of um and we want those worlds and those characters to become richer over time so you know every battle that you fight everyone you meet all of these things kind of become part of your identity or your character's Identity or your

world's identity uh and we're right at the beginning with that we we we're using a lot of interesting new tech we we're using a lot of procedural Generation stuff that you might have seen in previous games but kind of sprinkling on top of that some AI stuff that kind of we think helps to bring it to life so you every day you'll have a new world will be generated and everyone can play together in that world which I think it's kind of I like that because it's goes a little bit back to kind of how TV used to be when I was a kid we'd all watch the same thing at the same time and we've moved away from that into this nonlinear world but what you lose is that kind of we're all doing this together that I I've just been experiencing this with my family and friends because I've got into a TV show called the traitors um and it's the first time in ages that you know we have to watch that at 9ine o'clock at night we have to watch it we have to look at our Twitter and see what's happening now and that discussion of you know everyone being in the same thing at the same time is cool and yeah even games like Wordle do this right it's like have you played today's world and so so we we love the idea of generating new things every day but as a tiny company we can't you know we cannot build a new world every day

and we certainly can't build a new world for every person every day so that's where we've been looking into using AI to help us to do that to build the stories in those worlds to flesh out the characters in those worlds and that that's kind of what the talk was about some of the experiments that we did inside and outside of that game we created a virtual narrator with an actor from The Witcher who kind of talks you through that and I also wanted to sort of talk a little bit about the ethical implications of some of this stuff because you know with good reason people can be a little bit scared of AI it's going to it is a huge change and that change has only just started so that was one of the other things I was really Keen to talk about in the talk is we're trying to take an ethical approach to these things we don't want to be the bad guys but at the same time we don't want to completely hide away from what is a really exciting technology what I also like about that is that AI is an element of the game so you're still very creative but AI is the element in this case it's also the voice some the narrative some of the storytelling but I'm still creating the

story how did you sort of sprinkle AI on top as you say so the the first thing we've done we we've created this uh we call it a combat test the game isn't going to be ready for a long time but we wanted to sort of test out some combat mechanics and also test out the first phase of this kind of AI generation and so what that does is is the narrator kind of talks you through what you're going to see in today's dungeon and we we call it a a meta story so we we're creating the dungeon really not using that much AI it's using kind of procedural generation systems that you might see in you know super complicated games like Dwarf Fortress or whatever you know they're building these incredibly deep worlds but what AI allows us to do is then say okay here's here's the story of this world that we've maybe generated procedurally rather than with AI but then let's use this to turn this into a really interesting narrative so it's interesting to listen to it doesn't sound the same over and over again you if you playing a game even a game with a huge audio budget there's a limited number of sound files that have been created and eventually you know you start hearing the football commentator

saying the same thing he said yesterday and it pulls you pulls you out of that world so we wanted this thing to feel completely organic completely real and so yeah AI allows us to kind of sprinkle that so we we we take what we call Meta stories which is the kind of the data version of the story the data version of the world the data version of the personality of a character and then we use a large language model that we've trained with our writers to sort of create an in-house style and then we turn that into English and then we put that into a voice model which we've trained with our voice actor um Tom Canton who who's an actor from The Witcher um and that that then creates this really really compelling narrative that that just brings the game to life and there's also a lot in there about exactly that you know you've used your models you've used your data sets and I'm hearing a lot today about how incredibly important that is because you want to sort of keep what you create or at least ethically be able to say if someone says let me know about your data set let me know about your prompts which

is what I've heard steam has been asking developers as well then you're able to say this is exactly where it is and this is exactly where it has its best impact so you're ethical and you're successful if it works out right I I hope so I think you know that there is a gray area that all of this stuff exists in we are using GPT as a language model and GPT is trained on a big publicly accessible but not open- Source data set so you know we we're using that but not saying write me a story in the style of George RR Martin we are saying you know here is here are lots of examples of how it should sound so we hopefully we're avoiding uh you know yes there's a gray area around who owns the IP you know are chat GPT infringing IP I don't think we're infringing IP because we are not outputting anything that would be recognizably in anyone else's style but I think a lot of these issues are going to need to be worked out over the next few years you know we we exist in this slightly strange space and our approach has just been to try to be the good guys you know we we we we're aware that some

people's noses will be put out of joint like as I said in the talk in 1982 people tried to ban synthesizers and sequences and my career would never have happened without synthesizers and sequences because I'm not very good at playing the piano but I can do this nice and slowly and build a tune that way so you know it's it's this technology is going to change a lot of things but as as with our our deal with our voice artists where we created the AI voice and then gave it to him we don't own it we said to him it's important that you own that you license it back to us for a fee but you want to go and license that to Activision you want to go and do this you want to do that it's fine so it's kind of trying to put the controls back in the hands of the people that deserve them and kind of you know as a as someone that creates content myself I don't want to be the bad guy kind of you know being the tech brow at the top of the pile stealing everyone's IP from them you are giving the IP owners back what you create and saying here it is I've got your great voice maybe with a Ure accent I don't know I heard about that one and uh and you have it and then

we'll license it back from you that's a very interesting model is that unique to you or is it simply because you feel you have to give back where you get your inspiration from I think it's it's a bit of both I think we uh it's about a year ago we did this deal with Tom and so it's before any of the kind of actor strikes and you know the writer strikes that that brought Ai and possible bad sides of AI to people's attention more and I think what we came up with I mean I don't think it was because of us but it certainly seems to be the kind of de that the unions are thinking as a much more reasonable one because you can understand it you know the example I drew was the parallel with uh taxi drivers in London you know taxi drivers in London have been kind of usurped by GPS technology and you don't want that to happen to people that are creators so you know we want to be able to make sure that people can continue to you know make a living profit from those things but also to do things that we couldn't do before that's that's the most exciting thing about AI it's not about can I do the voice for my my game much cheaper than before it's more about well I never could I make a voice for every

single player every single day before but all of a sudden I can so it's trying to navigate that in a way that's going to work for everybody and what's the player experience like because I understand that the game is not yet released you're working on it but it's going to be very interesting from the aspect that I can co-create my experience with my community so in a sense I am director as well as participant yeah so so we want to create a whole kind of creative ecosystem of players so you know we're creating these objects these Dice and these figures and these worlds and we're making games to play in those but we would love to get to the point where other people are making games in those too it's kind of like modding but going a lot further you know so you could do anything from you know you might just want to decorate your character to make it look the way you want it to look or you might want to curate your world and run a tournament inside that world and invite your friends and they can win this piece of loot that you put in there or you might want to go ahead and build your whole game for yourself and I I think if you if you can create that kind of ecosystem like happened with Dungeons

and Dragons until Hasbro kind of upset the community a little bit a couple of years ago but you know that that thing where it's it's more than a game it's a hobby and I'm you know some people who who want to create in those ecosystems are empowered to and some of them might even you know might make a living in it they might just be doing it for fun but it's that that's kind of what we're all about so it's not really about one game although the first game we're making called Bonita 6 it's super cool it's like a turnbas ro like multiplayer Dungeon adventure um but it's about much more that but at the end of the day gaming is a business give me a little bit of a peak into how you see it as the ways that you could be monetizing this the options the platforms even you know is it a steam is it an epic is it all of the above is it console is it mobile there's so much there to unpack what direction are you thinking eventually I'd love it to be all of those so so so the way that we imagine that we'll be monetizing this is you'll buy Dice and you use the dice to create the characters um You probably will pay

something in order to create a character that is sort of more tangible and long lasting if you want to you you can play you can play with a character for nothing but if you want that character to develop and to learn that costs us money so it's there needs to be some kind of Revenue model associated with that similarly with the worlds if you own a world maybe we're selling things for you to put in that world so I think the more important thing is is are people enjoying playing it people like it and they come back and you can nurture that e system of creation and and fun and you know everyone kind of collaborating in a hobby then we can make money out it but all of it starts with a good game and you know that that's what we're sort of heads down building so hopefully fingers crossed you know maybe towards the end of this year we'll be showing people something that is you know tangibly a good game I'll tell you what Harry without knowing it right you just came up with the name for the model because when you said that I thought hey to learn he to Lear hey to learn I'll get my trademark lawyer on it as quickly as possible yeah this was about voice this

was about narrative this was about character where can you imagine taking this you know for us the vision is is just these huge worlds that that that become more and more personal to you you know so so it it means something your characters mean something to you you kind of collect characters in this game by by combining different dice together to make different characters and they they'll go on different Adventures I love the idea that you could just drag four of those sitting around a fire and they'll start talking to each other they'll start telling you the story oh did I ever tell you about the time when I slayed this dragon and this you know that's when these things are genuinely becoming more interesting and more intelligent than we created them I think that that's where this stuff is is is super exciting so we see that this kind of world where you genuinely start caring about places and people because they are becoming more and more real and more and more kind of humanlike over time and because it's also more genuine it starts to feel like yeah to your point about the play to learn Lear I enjoy it then I am learning and it's a

great experience and it was a great interview Harry may I great to have you this show is all about how to do your job better how to make an amazing game how to Market it and you have a say so if you have a story or know someone we need to shine a light on then we would love to hear from you we want to hear from you we want to reflect the reality of the mobile games Market in all its wonderful complexity and strangeness so if you have any suggestions for us if you have any feedback for us you can always get in touch you can email us at podcast pocketgamer.biz you can find us on Twitter at PG Biz and you can reach out to us through the pocketgamer.biz website if you're interested in listening to all of our podcasts you can find them at pocketgamer.biz podcast and we would love to hear your thoughts on future shows and we've got you covered on all all the major platforms so subscribe to the audio

podcast as Brian said look for us on YouTube if you want to read it hey you can do that too because we have a companion post for you as well on the pocketgamer.biz website tune in again for the next edition of the pocketgamer.biz podcast and we look forward to speaking to you in the near future until then I'm Brian Bago I'm Peggy and salts and that's a wrap until next week m