For King, the new opportunities offered by AI in improving and speeding up game development aren't new at all.
The Candy Crush maker has been utilising and researching machine learning and AI tech for over half a decade, which is even before it acquired Peltarion, the Swedish-based AI software company it picked up in 2022.
King's AI Labs is a sizeable department led by Sahar Asadi, and the firm has already introduced AI tools that its teams are using in games such as Candy Crush. In fact, one of those tools has already had a profound impact on the development of the hit mobile game.
"The playtesting bot we've developed gives designers, prior to releasing a level, an understanding of the game experience for the players," Asadi explains. "They can see whether the level they've created is providing the desired experience or not, and if not they can go back and refine it.
"We've also built on top of this bot a tweaking solution. If a designer says there are a few levels that don't have the intended experience, and these are the criteria for that experience, the bot can make refinements automatically. The best refined solutions are sent to the designers, and they can pick the best ones and go from there.
"The fun part for designers is to create levels. The mundane part is iterating, playing the level, looking at how it is, and if you're not happy going back and tweaking it. That manual work is mundane. The playtesting bot has been helping to reduce the time on tweaking, and that allows for more time on the creative part, which is making and innovating with levels."
AI being used to play games isn't new. We've had computers play chess against world champions for decades. But the AI that King has built isn't trying to beat humans but replicate them. And that required a different approach.
"For us, the key element about playtesting is to make sure it's human-like. A few years ago, there was this AlphaGo from DeepMind, which was playing Go against the master of Go, and the goal was
Making games
Candy Crush