How Does AI Revolutionize the Game Development Industry
If you are a fan of video games whether you play multiplayer titles like PUBG or single-player games like GTAV, you might already have an idea of the efforts that go into the development of games.
Video games, depending on their quality, take months and sometimes even years to build and deploy in actual markets. However, that might be changing thanks to new technologies like Artificial Intelligence (AI).
AI is optimizing the game development industry just like it’s transforming other industries including fintech, healthcare, app development, and more. The game development industry, however, has more usages of AI apart from the development part.
In this blog, we will discuss some of the most practical use cases of AI for the game development industry.
So, without further ado, let’s begin!
- Making games smarter
AI lets game developers put unscripted life into games. The technology lets game developers use AI to give Non-playable Characters (NPCs) background stories. Through AI advantages like reinforcement learning, NPCs are able to track the playing behavior of a player to optimize their actions accordingly.
To take an example, Alien: Isolation is a popular video game title available for console players. The horror game uses machine learning, deep learning, and AI to optimize the gaming experience. Depending on the gaming difficulty chosen by the player, Alien: Isolation’s antagonist, literally an alien, changes its behavior to hunt the protagonist.
This makes the gaming pattern unpredictable and every time the plate decides to play the title, they meet challenges they have never encountered before.
- Faster game development speed
AI helps in developing games faster thanks to the existence of tools that let programmers write codes for different parts of the game. AI also lets create smoother animations, detailed environments, realistic character movements, and more. CryEngine 3, Amazon Lumberyard, and Panda 3D are among some of the popular names built by the leading AI development companies that use AI.
These tools use AI to create perspectives, and animations, automate the scripting of some characters, create smoother animations, and more. Using AI also saves developers time by eliminating the requirement of having to write codes from the ground up for each game character or element.
- Faster game testing and maintenance
AI is revolutionizing the game testing stage as well and making it easier to build and launch bigger games. Using automated testing scripts and game testing tools, developers save some time before launching the final product. Nevertheless, AI has not entirely replaced the manual game-testing process.
Most game developers, depending on their budget, use both strategies to test their games. For instance, the recently released title Cyberpunk used game testers as well to test the game. These developers analyzed every element of the game ranging from textures to possible bugs.
- Smoother animations and perfect lip-syncing
Artificial intelligence development companies use AI for many creative reasons. The technology is used to create perfect lip-syncing animations for games and movies. AccuLips in iClone 8 is an example of this case. The technology supports the English language only in iClone 8 for now but has a vocabulary of over 200,000 words. Developers are also able to customize words to generate more personalized animations.
- Text-to-audio for dialogue generation
AI is eliminating the dependency on voice actors as it’s getting smarter. It can be a piece of bad news for people involved in the art of voice acting but for game developers with fewer resources, generating dialogue using texts is turning out to be a blessing.
Some tools like Dialogues AI are available with free basic features for anyone to generate dialogues using texts. Ubisoft, a leading game development company, has also launched its own AI Ghostwriting and dialogue generator called “Ghostwriter” to generate dialogues for NPCs faster.
- Smarter data collection and mining
Interesting games are built when developers have enough understanding of what players might want. To help this understanding get more accurate, AI is useful in collecting players’ behavioral data. AI is capable of tracing how players play games and what actions they take to suggest to developers what they could do with their future games. Games like GTA, The Last of US, and Assassin’s Creed use this data to optimize the gaming experience they have been offering throughout the years.
- Preparing the game development strategy
To tackle the competition and make a new title successful in the game development industry, focusing on crafting more careful development strategies has become important. Using AI features like predictive analytics can help developers find out what trends are expected to have a stronger hold in the future.
AI’s predictive analytics can help developers find genres, game features, and more that have a higher probability of getting successful in the future before they finalize a game strategy. An AI-supported development strategy can reduce the wastage of resources and efforts while helping companies survive, especially if these companies have low budgets.
Not only that, individual developers looking for a break in the industry by building a successful title can also use the advantages of the technology to build something that has a higher probability of getting successful.
Conclusion- The future of AI in the game development industry
Game and app developers in UK, the USA, India, or any other corner of the world are adopting the technology for its obvious benefits. As you can see in the above statistics by GlobalNewswire, AI in the game development industry is expected to grow with a CAGR of 23.3% and by 2032 might value more than $7,105 million.
Using AI is not only trimming down the development time but also helping creators get extra creative with low to no limitations of building environments, characters, scripts, and more. Instead of worrying about resources to create bigger games, developers can now focus on improving the quality of their games.
But it is also a truth that AI is boosting competitiveness in the game development industry. With easily accessible tools, more startups and freelance developers will move to develop games which will bring massive competition in the industry compared to what exists now. So, whether small or large game developers, participants in the gaming industry will have to brace themselves and start leveraging AI asap.
