Former Naughty Dog technical art director Andrew Maximov has shared an in-depth video keynote detailing how his next venture, Promethean AI, will help devs more easily create rich virtual worlds.
Maximov departed the Uncharted and The Last of Us developer in 2018, and soon after established Promethian AI to streamline game world production and put the focus “back on creativity, variety, and team empowerment.”
Promethean AI is pitched as “the world’s first AI that works with artists [and] assists them in the process of building virtual worlds.” The technology is designed to take on some of the more mundane and non-creative tasks associated with the process, but is also capable of creative problem solving thanks to its ability to learn and adapt to individual tastes.
The keynote above shows how the technology can be used to create a wide range of indoor and outdoor environments such as living areas, workplaces, garages, campsites, and gardens by leaning on contextual commands that will result in it only suggesting assets that are appropriate for a given scenario.
“Our new keynote outlines the future of game world production with Artificial Intelligence, introduces an accessible concept of levels (like in self driving cars) to describe the industry transition to AI assisted world building, demonstrates a whole slew of beautiful examples as well as state of the art content management and organization tools,” commented Maximov.
“From crunch to loot boxes, a lot of poor decisions we make as an industry are dictated by the exponentially rising cost and complexity of developing high quality games (200+ million for a AAA title now). And we do believe that Promethean AI will be one of the biggest ways to substantially cut down that cost and bring the focus back on creativity, variety and team empowerment.”
The full keynote (embedded above) is packed full of technical tidbits and details, so be sure to check it out if you want to learn more.