AI is making your Candy Crush Saga sessions less frustrating

It’s no surprise that AI was perhaps the biggest topic of discussion at this year’s Game Developers Conference. The emerging technology was all over the convention’s show floor, with massive booths showcasing demos from companies like Inworld. Behind the scenes, Nvidia showed off some even more impressive tools. A Ubisoft-created experience using Nvidia’s Ace microservice turned heads, as it allowed players to speak to NPCs through a microphone and get cogent AI responses on the fly.

Naturally, it was a topic of debate throughout the week. During the event’s annual Game Developers Choice Awards, presenters pushed back on the fast-approaching wave of generative AI that poses an existential threat to human creators. However, not every use of tech is built to push humans out of the creative process. Some, like the AI tools powering Candy Crush Saga, make a stronger case for AI’s more helpful use cases for creators.

AI as a co-pilot

Developers from King, which was recently acquired by Xbox, would take the stage multiple times during the week to talk about the tech powering its games. One panel in particular focused on how the studio uses AI to create Candy Crush Saga levels. On a surface read, a critic of the tech might decry that use case as something that takes work away from designers. When I spoke to Sahar Assadi, Director of AI Labs at King, she painted a much more human view of how the company uses the tool.

“We are applying AI as an assistive tool as a process for creating levels,” Assadi tells Digital Trends. “We have an AI solution for playtesting, and on top of that, we’ve built an AI tweaking system. The playtesting model helps us get insight into the gameplay experience. For a level a designer is creating, we get data on what the gameplay looks like and a lot of metrics on the amount of challenge that helps the designers shorten the cycle of the mundane task of iterating.”

What we’re doing is thinking about it more like a co-pilot for design …

By Assadi’s