How can AI help simplify the lives of mobile developers?

AI is taking over the world but does it really mean anything for mobile developers or publishers well I think uh I found a perfect person to talk about Joanna say hi there I'm Ivana I'm the founder of pickfinder and kind of a been around the block in the gaming industry I used to be the chief product officer for Houma and before that I was the CEO for game Analytics exactly that's why I think the honor has a all of the possible perspectives social works now yeah she will work in the SAS company with the data to work for the product so yeah she knows everything and uh yeah let's quickly take a look at what are we going to discuss today so there'll be like four sections we'll keep a nice short and easy so the first

one how do we make mobile devs lives easier with the AI second one how to make a good prompt third one what are the most common pitfalls when using AI tools and the fourth one what processes does it still make sense to do manually um yeah let's do it so how do we make mobile dive lives easier with an AI and Jonah I want to specifically um also focus on three different stages of the life cycle of the developer so for example I'm a developer and I'm starting developing a game where do I start what are the tools what should I do yeah it does sure um so um first of all there is right now more you can do with AI never before right I think as an indie developer for instance what Unity released is a lot of

capabilities for you to actually code with AI as well um and kind of build your game I do think that um also you still have to have a pretty clear idea of what you want to build and you can get things like ideas for games from chat GPT but I think all of that is going to be pretty generic so basically the industry knowledge still has to come from you you still have to have an idea of what you want to build what you can build um then I think AI can assist you with a lot of the assets so you can get images for your backgrounds for your characters and so on from things like pic finder if they are 2D you can get your music and your voice is generated with a yeah you can get kind of the code written for the game um in unity and you can start to generate kind of 3D assets with AI tools so there is a lot that you can do but it's not going to replace you being kind of a great gaming professional that has done their research and wants to build a certain kind of game yeah yeah I mean whenever I try to

generate something where chat GPT from scratch it's usually either too generic or uh it's just nonsense it can makes stuff up right uh yeah I think it's so we for instance use strategypt a lot to assist in coding and it's really great for that like my co-founder who's like the technical co-founder really loves it I use it a lot as well more like a brainstorming buddy but again it you very much get out of it what you put into it so it's a bit like the more you prompted in an advanced way the more it's helpful but also at certain at a certain point if you have to be super specific you might as well do the work yourself so for instance a lot of the writing that I do I don't actually use chat GPT for writing because I'm like very fast very experienced at writing and it would take me the same amount of time to like write stuff myself or like work with jbt so I'll only use it like initially to get an idea to create a structure just basically to get going and then um I will just do it and it's

also with images um I think it's it's also very helpful to explore or to start so for instance your final assets might have might be a combination of like stuff you generated and stuff you worked on yourself you still need an artist to work with any images that you generate and to get them to fit in and to get them to be consistent but if you don't really know which creative Direction you want to take we have a lot of developers especially in these that tell us hey I'm a developer I'm not an artist and I found it really hard to communicate with my artist before and to tell them what I want and now I can just kind of storyboard or create images to show them and then my artists can take that over and kind of create the final look of what we want I'll say what is a like again like I'm starting to develop a game what is uh I understand that I I will rely on my own experience on my team but what are the tools can that can help me at this stage

um well if you can use it like I mentioned so if you're just starting out you can use a bit of everything so first is they're like AI that just does ideation and helps you to do kind of Market intelligence and generate game ideas uh there's also Publishers that actually have ideas of for instance Homa has a portal where you can get ideas for games over the publishing team will share ideas for games um I think the other challenge is let's say you built the game like I'm not going to go into like unity's AI suite and so on because they have many capabilities but if you've built like some sort of prototype the other thing that you typically need is to generate the creatives and then generating creatives who usually start from some sort of like video recording that you have but again you can add voiceovers you can localize these recordings again you can generate cover images to add at the beginning or at the end so you can still get quite a lot of things I would also say when you're developing the assets um something that is very possible to do other than storyboard and AI is to get

like especially more generic assets so for instance we can have a look later but in casual games there's usually like coins gems like all this stuff where you don't need like a super particular unique unique look and you can get a lot of this stuff either from online libraries of which there are some but you can also generate your own with AI if you do want to kind of make your game more unique you guys soon uh if I'm okay I got my game uh uh and now I'm starting to work with uh publisher like is there like a certain processes where AI can help me to optimize whatever the workflows I'm having at this stage um great question so usually a publisher will have their own process but the process is that they will tell and then if the game is successful just with the basic metrics like has enough retention has enough play time and so on uh then they will look at a optimizing the game like increasing the

metrics and two improving the marketing so kind of optimizing the creatives um something that I found when I was working in a publisher is that if you like rush to publish you know like if you remember the hyper casual days there was this Rush of like rushing to publish so you don't get copied yeah yeah now now there's a bit less of it but it's still going on but usually what would happen is you kind of Rush the Prototype made all of the changes as soon as possible and then by the time you launched it it was kind of a mess of spaghetti code um so then when you were trying to add live systems and now there's like a lot of focus on IEP it was very hard I think one of the ways that AI can help with this is obviously if you can have like code health checks or if you can have like a coding module or if there's a standard way to use uh tools or if the publisher enforces the use of certain tools like copilot and so on uh or anything that Unity provides then you can probably just create cleaner better quality code and I would really suggest

investing in this because it will save like if your game is successful like if your prototype has passed the initial stages and it's on the way to be successful then you don't want to actually have the game last three months instead of three years because it was so poorly designed that now you're in this kind of spiral of I need to make the game better but I can't do it now because it's in launch so I just need to add more features so I'm going to do it later but later never comes in the the game the grades versus if you do it build it a bit better with better quality from the beginning you're able to add features in a healthier way and kind of keep the game growing so I think this is one of the major trade-offs that impacts Developers that I'm not sure that I hear a lot being talked about in the industry but I think it's very important and again the other aspect is much more in relation to localization you can much more easily localize your assets like versus where whether it's just text in the game even like app store and so on and usually the publisher will do this but that's what I

mean like the publisher will bring in all this processes like let's localize your game Let's localize the audio localize the creatives let's do ASO in different languages um and AI can be used for all of these things makes sense um let's jump into the next stage so I'm no longer a developer I'm a publisher and I have a good example I found like pretty recently on mobile game gamer.biz here so I really love this article and like perfect timing for our video so it basically describes how a team of five use the I uh to do a work of like team of 25 and they list uh like a tools that they use is a uh yeah that's a team that the creatives that they use so that's basically already like they can already publish with that right so they have a creative they have everything

um yeah well it seems like first of all this is great like in terms of like in real in terms of PR right so you can kind of raise a lot of money saying like Okay I can uh with a team of five I can do the work of 25 but also kind of uh creates a different path like for smaller Publishers maybe let's talk a little bit about that right so I think half of another Studio they're not a publisher they're a studio for self-publishers um and I know Peter I know where he was when he was building it and I do think I think the advantage of starting the studio now is you just can start off in an AI native way so you do not have like any tools that you've built that you're tied to you can just go full AI um I will say just keep in mind everybody else can also do the work of 25 people so I don't think it's the advantage that you think it is

um because like it helps if you have an AI native team but what I am noticing is a lot of Publishers even if they have existing teams or creating AI native teams within the publisher so you kind of have to still bring some sort of Edge on top of just using AI tools this being said I think this idea of using like quizzes and kind of images like this is a perfectly scalable model because you can generate both the images and the text with AI and you can a B test them to death and just find like the best content that has the best retention the best images the best style and so on um and you can kind of get a successful uh thing out of it but um I would also say I I think even Peter mentioned this when I was speaking to him so the founder he said oh we did it and then we realized that if we could do it so quickly somebody else can also do it that just as quickly so we need to kind of keep going we need to keep you know innovating and I think that's the pressure right now there's like there's

actually the edge is not in using AI because all of these tools cost like 50 bucks altogether to get like anybody can use AI it's more about how you're going to use them to generate something that is uh unique right and I think this was is also the case with Chad GPT where I'm not sure if you've noticed this but I'd like I've been speaking about this where it's become pointless to read anything like you know a recent Trend now is people posting an article and then a chance repeat summary of the article and sort of like my dude if I wanted to see beauty summary of the article I could get it myself it's like not like all of this stuff like usage of AI gets old very very quickly I've never seen a hype cycle as accelerated as we're seeing now with AI so I think a lot of these experiments need to evolve into not just using AI to create like um I mean you can use it to have quick wins and to experiment and to learn which I think is what Half Moon did but

you can also use it to really increase the quality of the content and I actually think that's where the final battle will be fought I think it will be fought in making great products Stellar I don't think it'll be fought in putting out like a million medium quality products because like hyper casual's already done that like we've already been through this cycle in the game industry and we know that fundamentally it's a marketing cycle that does not like produce as lesser and lesser success does that make sense no it makes sense yeah I was just wondering and yeah curious to hear about your opinion so I was always looking at this like you can have a killer product like okay this is preferable way right then you've got to have a killer marketing let's say so and with the average pro the product you can still be profitable with the killer marketing and then I thought maybe now like with the team

that knows how to use this like tools even though they cost like 50 bucks doesn't matter but you build a team of the experts whatever that means but they they can utilize AI in top-notch way so do you still think this can be an advantage for uh teams that self-publishers the title or they should still focus on the like solving the product and the like cornerstones of the publishing um so what I can tell you is that publisher tests hundreds of prototypes a month and the moment there is a successful like AI game that can be easily copied it would be copied to death so the advantage will be lost very quickly but that like there's still an advantage in being the first in doing that and again they're still an advantage in being AI native Native and not thinking like everybody else is thinking um but again I I would say it's also the case that killer marketing

can mean something different than what we're used to right so we're I mean this is kind of like slightly off topic from AI but we know that the game industry is now in a strange state where it's literally like older games that are successful it's basically fundamentally a cash burning business it's not like who has the best marketing it's not who has the best product it's who has the biggest piles of cash and the highest margin to keep investing cash yeah and because of that it's very hard to say what the right thing to do is that's why I I think it's good to kind of go with a publisher that can run that race for you if you have a great game I think it's very hard right now to be an indie publisher don't get in the like self-published Studio I'm not saying it's impossible don't get me wrong and I truly wish I long for the days of like the in the uh when being like an indie developer was still a business model but I think more and more it's no longer quite the business model that it used to be and I'm very much

hoping that people like please prove me wrong I would love nothing than to be wrong on this um but um yeah so what I would say is also Publishers have a heavy incentive because if they leverage AI for their Studios they get to leverage all of this margin or if they use AI they can apply it to 50 Studios instead of one so they're the first people that are incentivized to use AI in as many places as possible to automate things and they also have the cash to invest to actually like if they make 100 creatives with AI 2ab test them all if they launch 100 prototypes to test them all and so on which all it takes like ads dollars and time and marketing dollars and energy developer doesn't have I still think for the entity developer there's a lot more pressure on getting the product right and getting the product in the niche like making it quirky making it unusual making it relatable I also think that cross-platform is maybe a consideration again because again if you have a product that works on mobile and could work on Steam maybe that's a

public that's more used to paying it might be better for you is it indeed so what I would say is it's a tough time you kind of have to compete on everything I don't think as an indie developer you can compete on everything I think you need to compete on the product and let like a publisher do the competition on marketing for you but if you believe you have the strength if you're super experienced team that there knows what they're doing then by all means you know like go and kill it