If you believed all the hype out there, you might think that making a mobile game is as easy as whacking a few prompts into a jazzy new AI tool. But we’re still some way off what Simon Davis of Goat Gaming has termed an “extinction-level event” for coders, it seems.
Yes, many studios are now leaning heavily on AI for coding, concept art, UA ad creative and data analysis. Internal company chatbots are everywhere, too. But there still hasn’t been a big breakthrough game that uses this tech in novel ways for players – and game production has not sped up so quickly that new games are being conceived, built and released in a fraction of the time it used to. Not yet, at least.
So to get a sense of where ‘AI-first’ game development is right now, we asked three developers who have put these new tools at the heart of their game-making processes. First, there’s Cosmic Lounge CEO Tomi Huttula, who claimed back in March 2024 that his firm’s AI-powered Puzzle Engine could spit out a working game prototype in a matter of hours based on prompts.
“Building innovative tools invariably requires significant time, an aspect often overlooked in AI discussions,” Huttula told us. “Effective AI tools accelerate workflows considerably, but their development involves upfront investment and time. It’s also accurate to say many studios remain cautious about publicly sharing their AI implementation strategies.”
Cosmic Lounge’s Pets & Puzzles is currently in soft launch in the US. It’s a match 3 with a pet rescue theme whose core gameplay – and live ops-friendly minigames – have been built using Cosmic Lounge’s Puzzle Engine.
“Minigames that resonate with audiences in ads can be seamlessly integrated into the main game without additional coding,” says Huttula, who claims that AI tools have seen a “20-fold increase in productivity” compared to using traditional methods. Cosmic Lounge’s artists also leverage AI tools “for about 50-99% of their total effort, depending on asset complexity,” he said.
Hero Wars maker Gdev recently acquired ‘AI first’ studio Light Hour Games for an undisclosed fee. But cofounder Kostantin Mitrofanov says: “Full-blown ‘AI games’ are unlikely just yet: the tools are still immature and mistakes can be costly. AI’s presence is strongest behind the scenes – in production and ops, where players don’t directly notice it.”
Light Hour uses a custom-trained Stable Diffusion model for art, Kling and Krea for video creative, Claude and ChatGPT for coding and N8n agents for other tasks, says fellow Light Hour cofounder Ilya Nikitin. These new processes have sped up game production “dramatically”, and art tasks are 5-20 times faster, he says.
“We started with just five people in the first year and made 13 game versions – including an early midcore prototype that evolved completely,” Nikitin told us. “It’s been one year and seven months since day one, and we’ve essentially built several games before landing on the current concept. Given our size and the volume of experiments, we’re happy with the pace.”
French publisher TapNation is another firm pushing hard into AI. VP of Engineering Kamel Haddad agrees that a new wave of AI games will take longer than expected to arrive, and that it’ll still take time for established companies to shift both their thinking and their processes.
“We had to work hard to educate people and switch people’s mindsets to ‘AI first’ thinking,” said Haddad. “This is a long run process, things are not perfect yet, but we keep working on improving our efficiency thanks to AI technologies that keep evolving every day.”
TapNation is mostly using GPT-4 and Layer.ai for asset production and coding assistance, and Haddad estimates that these tools have boosted the speed of asset creation by about 90%. Coding is now 30-40% quicker, he said.
Simpler puzzle, trivia and word games are likely to emerge first, adds Haddad: “We have not brought AI games truly to the market yet, we’re still in the iteration phase – but it’s already looking promising.”
Indeed, besides a few soft launches and tech demos, promise is all we have to go on currently. Cosmic Lounge’s Huttula acknowledges there is an issue with expectation management, “particularly concerning assumptions about how drastically AI will alter player experiences”. He predicts that the big consumer-facing changes will come within games based heavily on UGC.
Of the bigger, better funded players on mobile, Supercell is one of few out there talking about AI in games publicly – and others with large existing production pipelines will naturally find it harder to fully adapt to the new wave of tools.
So yes, the LinkedIn hypemen need to calm down a bit. AI is changing game development, undoubtedly. But this is not going to be some dramatic, overnight revolution – the slightly boring truth of it is that big structural changes like this tend to happen much more slowly than you think. And it’s always the smaller, nimbler, braver studios that reap the rewards.
