Four ways AI and cloud can make game dev easier (and one thing they can't do) | GI Sprint
Two of the technologies that have promised to change the way that games are made and played are cloud and artificial intelligence.
Cloud has been around for a while. Entire companies, such as Improbable, have been set up to help developers create more ambitious projects by offloading processing from gaming hardware to vast server farms. Microsoft has also experimented with this in the past; some of the AI companions in Titanfall were handled by the company's Azure servers all the way back in 2014.
Meanwhile, AI has been grabbing more headlines recently thanks to the ambitious claims about its capabilities.
To discuss how cloud and AI are going to help developers create games, GamesIndustry.biz head Christopher Dring spoke with Xbox's GM for gaming AI, Haiyan Zhang, and Brady Woods, the company's product leader for Xbox Game Creator services.
You can watch the full discussion below, download it here, or find it on the podcasting platform of your choice.
One of the promises of AI is that it will handle many of the boring and time-consuming tasks developers have to tackle and will instead allow them to focus on more creative and innovative ventures. Zhang says that game creators have found Microsoft's suite of AI tools, such as ChatGPT and its Microsoft 365 Copilot chatbot, helpful when creating their games.
"They have been really useful to devs from AAA to indies in the way they're not fully integrated into the development pipeline, so it can be used as an additional tool," she says.
"We've also seen great work from our colleagues at GitHub Copilot, who are bringing GPT and AI to support developers in code completion when they are actually in development. As you write code, the AI supports you and finishes snippets of code for you. Developers can gain a lot of efficiencies from these tools."
Woods adds that AI tools like the previously-mentioned Copilot chatbot will allow developers to focus more on the creative aspects of game creation rather than boring daily tasks.
"These
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