There’s plenty of AI bluster out there, but Cosmic Lounge is one of few game developers showing off real, actual game-making AI tech right now.
Tomi Huttula cofounded Cosmic Lounge in 2022 with €4.5m in VC funding and a €400k grant from the Finnish government. The team is made up of veterans from Seriously, Playtika, Next and others, with Huttula himself a former leader at King, EA and Kabam. It currently employs 20 developers across three studios in Helsinki, Oulu and Stockholm.
Speaking at the Think Games event in Istanbul last week, Huttula outlined what’s possible with Cosmic Lounge’s AI-driven game design and market testing tool, Puzzle Engine.
“Yes, AI is really changing how games are developed and it is a big part of the future of game development,” he began. “My recommendation to everybody here is that you should be getting your teams and technology ready for AI.”
He went on to demo the tech, which allows designers to generate puzzle engines, game logic, levels and art using drop-down menus and prompts. Cosmic Lounge’s developers can also use AI bots to test and optimise the prototypes they generate. Huttula also showcased a puzzler prototype called Angry Dev that he says was created in Puzzle Engine in “five to six hours”.
Cosmic Lounge is using its in-house tech to find “new, high potential puzzle genres”, said Huttula. “Creative people have a lot of game ideas. The challenge, of course, always has been: how do you know if your idea is good?”
“Typically within companies a designer has an idea, but they need an artist and an engineer to try the idea. So we want it to be super easy for designers – they can come up with ideas to create a prototype, just with Puzzle Engine, without an artist or an engineer.”
Huttula said the studio only employs two level designers, who test and tweak the results the AI spits out as they go.
Level production is an obvious problem to solve for those making casual puzzlers, said Huttula, given the need to generate tens of thousands of levels. He says Cosmic Lounge’s tech can do that itself, and also make an AI bot play through the levels it generates, giving its human designers feedback based on difficulty and where the potential churn and monetisation points might be. The designers can then edit and tweak from there.
“We don’t think that AI is doing anybody’s job,” said Huttula. “This is not replacing somebody…we are thinking about AI as helping our team members to do their job better, be more productive and get better results.”
For art, AI tools are great for generating game backgrounds, said Huttula, turning what was once several days’ work into a couple of minutes. But AI art is not quite mature enough to create characters consistently, he said.
Huttula also walked the audience through Cosmic Lounge’s use of AI in its marketing. He says its tech can generate UA minigames linked to the themes of the core game using the same system of drop-downs and prompts. A bot can then play through the generated minigame and generate a short video ad that a marketer can tweak and test after that.
He concluded: “Game designers have a lot of ideas and the current bottleneck is really about creating prototypes so that you can see if you can take them any further.”
“AI can generate levels, but can it actually generate game designs? Maybe this is something that we should revisit in a year, maybe, because AI is moving pretty fast.”
