Roblox and Its Generative AI: How Game Creation, and the Metaverse, May Be Changing

One of the first popular mods was Castle Smurfenstein in the early 1980s, a mod of Id Software’s popular Castle Wolfenstein game. Id followed with the release of Doom in 1993, which included a WAD file package for Doom’s maps, sprites, Yakov Livshits textures, assets, etc. And of course, there’s Counter-strike, the most popular mod for Valve’s Half Life, and Defense of the Ancients, itself a mod of the popular Warcraft game and the precursor for Riot’s League of Legends.

• Back in February, Roblox revealed its vision for generative AI in Roblox Studio, hoping the tech would empower everyone to become creators.
• Patrick Mills, the acting franchise content strategy lead at CD Projekt Red, acknowledges that generative AI is coming to games, but sees it as a long way off.
• Over the last nine years, Elaine has managed investment portfolio using fundamental analysis and value investing, emphasizing long-term time horizons.
• Both of those functions might sound familiar to you if you’ve experimented AI chatbots — GPT-3 can already create functional code snippets based on prompts.
• Meanwhile, AI Code Assist allows users to create code through natural language prompts and automatically summarize code to create comments.
• This has the potential to turn Roblox into a fully operating digital society where commerce, social interactions and creativity coexist.

“You can forgive generators that produce a face with wonky ears or some lines of gibberish text. Corazza said in his GDC talk, “we’re seeing a new generation of generative AI creating amazing results. Advances in the technology and how it can be used are happening at the speed of weeks”. When consumer spending gets tight, gamers spend more of their budget on their favorite games while taking fewer chances on new titles. Thus, companies cater to that reality by canceling and postponing new launches while focusing on their biggest releases, like they are doing now. When she isn’t writing or playing games, she can often be found binge-watching Parks & Rec or The Office, proudly considering herself to be a cross between Leslie Knope and Pam Beasley.

Roblox Looks to Revolutionize Game Asset Creation with Generative AI Integration

But with advances in the technology happening in weeks, I think it’s safe to assume that generative AI in gaming will look different by the end of this year to how it looks now. As Corazza said in his GDC talk, generative AI’s success is down to context and too much of the time we expect AI to give an answer when there’s not enough context given. From his experience, if you give AI three lines of code vs none, the success of generative AI increases by 50%. Perhaps one of the most high-profile stories has been Getty Images accusing Stable Diffusion of taking around 12 million images from its photo database “without permission … This came from Julian Togelius, co-director of NYU Game Innovation Lab when he explained that you can’t just take something that is very hard to control and use it for something like level design.

Just four months ago, ArsTechnica reported that the company was not that clear if these tools would work enough for a public release. But Roblox took the advantage of advances in natural language code generation they have rolled a few weeks ago. Ubisoft says the ultimate goal is to give designers the ability to create AI systems tailored to their specific needs by using a back-end tool called Ernestine for creating large language models of their own—like Ghostwriter.

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If people with no coding or design experience could just type an idea for a piece of clothing and then put it up for sale on Roblox, that could be an easier way for people to make stuff and sell it on the platform. Generative AI is a type of artificial intelligence that can create new content—such as text, images, music, or in-game content—using prompts. It learns from a large amount of data and uses it to generate new content, ranging from simple sentences to videos and even complex works of art.

Yakov Livshits
Founder of the DevEducation project
A prolific businessman and investor, and the founder of several large companies in Israel, the USA and the UAE, Yakov’s corporation comprises over 2,000 employees all over the world. He graduated from the University of Oxford in the UK and Technion in Israel, before moving on to study complex systems science at NECSI in the USA. Yakov has a Masters in Software Development.

In Generative AI Creativity Market, we previously analysed the swathes of future opportunities artificial intelligence will bring to the creative industries. By empowering anyone to become a video game creator, Roblox hints at new opportunities for any company to inject its branding, avatars or the latest product in any video game or virtual reality world. The company says it is testing two different implementations of generative AI, one that creates Yakov Livshits virtual materials based on a natural language prompt (the car textures in the video below) and another that can create code based on text inputs. In the meantime, AI will allow more users to create content in Roblox and iterate on their creations faster. The technology is widely used throughout the company including moderation and translation. Meanwhile, the AI code assist will allow users to create code through natural language prompts.

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Despite their different approaches, both games are also highly composable and horizontal, which allows for different games to be created across genres (fighting, MOBA, racing, etc.). However, there are some UGC games that are highly verticalized for a specific genre. In Halo Forge for example, gamers are encouraged to create levels and rulesets but within the mechanics of the Halo game. Another example, Roll20, is a customizable platform tailored specifically for table-top role-playing games (TTRPGs). The map below segments many popular UGC platforms by how vertical vs. horizontal they are, and whether they’re game-first or platform-first.

The Flappy Birds of the world, I think the rich and complex things are gonna be very hard for these models to produce,” he says. Then you have Allen Adham chief design officer at Blizzard saying “prepare to be amazed. We are on the brink of a major evolution in how we build and manage our games”. The first session I sat in at GDC this year was given by Stefano Corazza, head of Roblox Studio where he discussed how the industry and Roblox is advancing content creation with generative AI. In fact, I ended up having to stand at the back during the talk, not because I was late (I know, very unlike me) but because it was already full.

The Australian family-owned importer of wines also limits Crate to a case-only purchase option, shipped in 100% recycled cartons with minimal print. The pinnacle of a new movement we called Guilded Luxury, this commissioned car comes with a bespoke haute couture garment designed by Iris van Herpen for the client. ‘The way we work, which is a very personalised process, is similar to how Rolls-Royce works with its clients.