A team of former Uber, Meta, and Creative Assembly professionals has founded Studio Atelico, a new AI engine startup aimed at revolutionizing game development with generative AI.

Studio Atelico’s technology empowers developers to create games powered by generative AI that operate directly on players’ devices, eliminating the reliance on costly cloud-based solutions. To demonstrate their innovation, the company has developed a tech demo, Generative Agents Realtime Playground (GARP), which showcases a dynamic virtual village inhabited by over 20 autonomous characters. The demo runs locally on a Nvidia RTX 3090.

The Shift to On-Device AI

Studio Atelico CEO Piero Molino explained the significance of their approach:

"The revolution is upon us. GenAI is enabling new interactive experiences that have never been possible before. However, the current, large-model approach that cloud AI providers are taking is fundamentally flawed for video games. Game developers currently implementing GenAI in their games are struggling due to the high costs and the lack of fine-grained control needed in video game development.

We've built something different — an AI Engine for video games that solves these problems by running on the player’s device and giving the developer a modular toolset to integrate in Unreal, Unity, and Godot."

Autonomous Agents and Emergent Behavior

Studio Atelico CTO and co-founder Paul Szerlip expanded on the capabilities of the AI engine demonstrated in GARP:

"In GARP, villagers are autonomous agents that plan their day, make decisions, take actions to complete objectives, form memories, engage in conversation, and coordinate with each other to complete tasks. All behavior is based on each character’s background, personality, and the memories of their experiences. Characters reflect on their experiences and learn, so every day is different."

This sophisticated system enables emergent behaviors. For instance, adding a character’s birthday to their memory can result in them spreading the news and the entire village organizing a party. Szerlip highlighted that achieving such dynamic interactions with traditional AI methods would require extensive manual programming, whereas their generative AI solution makes it effortless.

By prioritizing efficiency and adaptability, Studio Atelico’s AI engine sets the stage for a new era of immersive and interactive gameplay, offering developers a powerful tool to redefine what’s possible in video games.