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Growing up, Grant Osborne played a lot of video games.

“It was the early 1990s, so I played a lot of Super Nintendo, Chrono Trigger, classic RPGs, Japanese RPGs, me and my brother would be playing all the early Mario Karts and all the Zeldas,” Osborne says.

By Kurtis Eichler

Years later, when Osborne began studying computer science at the ���˴�Ƭ, he knew where he wanted to apply his skills.

“When I started doing software engineering at University, I wanted to use it to make games, and being an avid gamer, it was always a goal,” he says.

Since last year, Osborne has been the chief technology officer at Mighty Kingdom, one of the country’s largest independent video game developers. The Adelaide company has developed more than 50 mobile and console games for global companies including LEGO and Disney.

Mighty Kingdom, which boasts 50 million worldwide game downloads, has since teamed up with the Australian Institute for Machine Learning (AIML) to develop software tools that can harness AI in game development.

Osborne, who previously worked as AIML’s principal engineer, saw an opportunity for AI to be an important tool in the development of video games.

“Machine learning actually has a lot of adjacent skills, so a lot of the linear algebra and the things you need to do to make machine learning models work are also directly applicable over in the games industry.”

The video game industry is valued at more than $280 billion globally, with AI providing some new tools for developers to make their games better and faster. 

Under their partnership, Mighty Kingdom and AIML have developed a chatbot which can translate simple written descriptions of game scenes and environments into 3D models.

“We iterated a little bit on that and tried out four or five single shot reconstruction methods and landed on one that did a reasonable job most of the time,” Lane says.

Trained on a wide variety of images and captions, the machine learning model learned how to associate various parts of a written sentence with different images.

By learning these associations, Lane says, engineers were able to feed it text and ask what the image would look like.

Ideation in game development can take several days. Osborne says AI could eventually reduce this down to 20 minutes, saving artists considerable time in building a product.

He sees AI as tool to augment and unleash human creativity, not replace it.

“The same way Photoshop unleashed digital art in the ‘90s, generative AI will be another tool for skilled artists.”

Generative AI can take some of the workload in filling out game scenes, allowing artists to focus their time on crafting high quality assets, Osborne says.

“They free themselves up to go and create the hero pieces or to go and create the really handcrafted and fine-tuned things which I think still requires that human touch.”

Osborne says the blob out tool could give the company a competitive advantage when competing for work against some of the big-name developers.

“If, for example, we’re pitching on work and the ideas we come up with are able to be more fleshed out, actually getting to prototype stages… even for a pitch, that gives us a competitive advantage,” Osborne says.

“Even though we might be more expensive, we’re able to produce more, we’re able to get to cool ideas more quickly.

“That’s the edge.”