Lovelace Studio uses AI in order to help players create survival craft sandboxes

Lovelace Studio uses generative AI in Nyric, an interactive tool that helps bring gaming worlds alive for player builders.

This is a toolkit to build a community-driven metaverse or multiverse as you like. Players can use AI to create their own worlds and bring realms to live in a survival crafting game. Kayla Comalli said in an interview with GamesBeat that the goal is to give agency and connect social gamers to solo creators. Comalli said

: “We’re creating generative worlds using AI and gaming.” “We’ve done it for four years since we conceived the idea. It’s gotten more tangible and exciting in recent months. It’s a survival game for generative universes, like Midjourney“

With Nyric players can build generative AI worlds such as Alice in Wonderland, Viking worlds and more, with any style they choose. It adds themes, characters and styles. Each realm is a hexagonal matrix, connected to its neighbors. In the gameplay loop you can engage in regional diplomacy and pioneering.

Companions agents, the faebotsare pioneering toolkits for player abilities in these hexgrid realms. Players are incentivized to create connections, such as forming trade routes with neighbors, leading community factions, and expanding their empires. The game worlds are persistent and built as procedurally generated hexagonal grids. Inside those worlds the players can craft the details and enjoy emergent gameplay.

Wishlist Nyric todayand keep an eye out for playtest updates. Discordis a server.

On one side, a resource economy drives community-centric gaming while influence and diplomacy power individual competition. In a persistent 3D Multiverse, network effects are at play. Early discoverability can lead to virality for creators.

AI game companies are numerous. Comalli, however, said that Lovelace’s approach to allowing players to create virtual worlds of their own is different. Players can generate interactive 3D survival crafts realms with multiple biomes using prompts.

And inside the world is an AI companion that Comalli calls a faebot. This faebot has personality traits and can remember things that have happened in the world. Players can modify the parameters of the world, including the sky, the ground, the environment or the weather. Soon enough, it looks like a unique place.

The virtual worlds also have multiple users and they can be linked. Players can discover each other, and form a social network. Players can craft things together in the world like players do in the world of Valheim.

After generating the world in a procedural way, players have to customize the world to make it unique. This means that it enhances human creativity, rather than doing all the work with AI and having the player take the credit for it.

You can customize your assets, the stories, and the themes of the world. Lovelace is testing the game on Steam shortly.

Comalli and her Boston-based team have a background in robotics and computer vision. The team has raised $500,000 from investors including Sequoia Capital Scout, HalfCourt Ventures, Blindspot Ventures, and Umami Capital. And it plans to raise more money.

The company has been at it for four years.

The team is planning to bring on an AI engineer and a tech artist to support development.

Over time, the company expects to integrate with the Unity game engine. And it helps players easily share their worlds in an open platform.

“We definitely didn’t want it to be like a walled garden. The word sounds like an isolated experience. Our structure is like a representation of social networking. You scale and grow and there’s no real ceiling,” she said.

Origins

Comalli has been on “self-taught journey” from biology to robotics and gaming. She learned computer vision. And cofounder Alex Engel has been in games for a couple of decades at places like Disruptor Beam and Turbine. Their team has grown to five people.

“We were working with a lot of telemetry, a lot of runtime data and simulation systems, and also working with this extensions, starting five or six years ago,” Comalli said.

The focus was on runtime compute at the consumer level that powers gameplay, and allows emergent gameplay to percolate. Then generative AI came along and the team pivoted into procedural generation.

“We believe a lot of people want to be content creators,” Comalli said. “About 65% of social media platform users say they want to be a content creator. Only 3% are.”

So the idea became to provide the tools to make it easy for players to become more like developers. Rather than build its own large language models, Lovelace Studio is building its platform as an API on top of OpenAI.

“We have a pipeline that breaks down the world into like the biome, into the styles, the time periods, character and behaviors,” Comalli said.