• In line with its commitment to leveraging Generative AI in game creation, Homa held its first internal GenAI hackathon which resulted in 10 projects with the potential to increase efficiency and streamline the game creation process. One of the projects will soon be available to everyone inside Homa Lab. Stay tuned!

Artificial Intelligence has become a ubiquitous topic of conversation, with discussions revolving around the best tools, prompts, and practices. This once seemingly distant technology, accessible only to a few, has now become an indispensable part of our lives, impacting us in ways we could not have foreseen. Even for those less tech-savvy, AI can significantly simplify daily tasks.

Homa has been at the forefront of exploring and experimenting with Generative AI long before it gained widespread fame, reflecting our commitment to staying innovative and disruptive as digital natives. Our primary objective is to create tools that empower game creators to develop and publish successful games with hit potential. And that’s what we do through Homa Lab, which we’re now empowering with the introduction of new AI tools.

All teams at Homa, including both operations and tech specialists, have been tirelessly working to craft top-notch AI tools that enhance efficiency for everyone involved - from our internal processes at Homa to the developers and game creators we collaborate with.

In the following paragraphs, we will explore how Homa built 10 generative AI tools in 48 hours to streamline the game creation process. These tools include generating 3D assets using text prompts, creating personalized talking avatars, and generating complete game ideas with innate hit potential. Each tool showcases the powerful impact of AI in revolutionizing the game development landscape.

Why is GenAI such a powerful tool in the mobile gaming industry?

Generative AI I is allowing and encouraging game devs to push the boundaries of creativity and productivity. By harnessing the power of intelligent algorithms, AI can help shorten development cycles, reduce manual labor, and unlock new avenues for experimentation and innovation.

With the many tools available now, game creators can generate game assets, creatives, environments, storytelling and narratives, game ideas, game art, and more in just minutes. AI empowers developers to bring their visions to life more quickly and efficiently, fostering the creation of captivating games that resonate with players on a whole new level.

The first GenAI Homa Hackathon: building the base for more agile game creation

Generative AI has been a big priority for us at Homa this year, with our top management encouraging each of our teams to leverage its potential. But for us, it’s about more than just using already existing tools for us. We want to create them. That’s why we challenged our team to develop innovative GenAI projects that could make game devs’ lives easier. And this is how the FIRST GEN AI HOMA HACKATHON started.

• The goal? Achieve full automation, innovation and promote collaboration & speed of execution.
• The method? 10 teams. 48 hours. 1 prize.
• The result? 10 innovative mind-blowing projects.

We know you want to know more. So let’s go:

At the beginning of the year, our operations and tech team set themselves a huge challenge: leverage GenAI in all ways possible to make the game creation process as easy, efficient, and agile as possible, and empower our team and our tech platform (Homa Lab) with new features.

After some thinking, they devised a fantastic plan of asking our talented team to propose their craziest ideas for GenAI tools that could increase our efficiency.

So 20 team members got together into teams and worked for 48 hours. Not only coming up with the ideas but developing them and bringing them to life.

Once the projects were ready, we started to think about the best way to show them to our whole company. And we found the best moment ever: WORKATION 2023, our annual event in which we gather our team members from all over the world in the same to meet each other, strengthen our team, learn, and work together. This year, it took place in Arcachon (France), and it was truly unique.

During the encounter, the ten teams presented their projects to the Homa team - a super enriching and inspiring workshop.

And if you’re wondering how we chose the winners, the jury was nothing less than our whole company. As a gaming company, we couldn’t do this any other way than through a gamified experience. We asked all our team members to vote for their favorite project, and as this happened, the ranking was streamed in real-time.

Now, let’s review 3 of the 10 super-powerful projects the Homa team created within this Hackathon. And make sure to stay until the end because we have a hot spicy spoiler:

1. Talking 3D Avatars: from prompts to an animated personalized talking avatar

Doing a creative that stands out and captures the users’ interest is becoming more and more challenging. Also, creating variations of video ads to test takes a lot of time and thinking.

Aware of this situation, one of the teams had a motivation: Imagine generating large quantities of variations for video ads with talking avatars, just with a text prompt. And this is where the idea of the “Talking 3D Avatars” came from.

Talking 3D Avatars is an AI-based tool that makes it possible to create 3D talking avatars with different skins, make them narrate text prompts with different voices and speaking styles, and perform animations.

How does it work?

• The starting point, as usual, is to create a text prompt specifying the description for the desired avatar.
• Then, Stability.AI DreamStudio comes into play to generate the asset.
• Each 3D asset, whether character or object, can be derived into many variations at a very low cost.
• It’s also possible to modify the avatar animation to give it the appearance of speaking and generate subtitles.
• The end part would be to integrate the avatar into the creative easily.

In a nutshell, “Talking 3D Avatars” creates an avatar, animates it, and makes it talk inside your creative, both in 2D and 3D backgrounds. But this is not all. The benefits and use cases are extensive:

• Empower creatives to make interactive visuals that tap directly into different audiences
• Generate large quantities of video ad variations and test them in short time
• Generate mass content for social media at a much lower cost than regular animations
• Generate accessible creatives with Avatars that speak sign language
• Generate talking avatars in many languages for international audiences

"Talking 3D Avatars" started as an idea, but the team behind it brought it to life with a working prototype. And they even created an animated short with it. We're confident about the potential of this tool and that's why our tech team is exploring to leverage this further.

2. 3DGenie: from text prompts to 3D assets

3D assets are one of the key in-game elements. However, they’re pretty hard and expensive to get. First of all, expertise in 3D modeling and texturing is needed. Consistency in style and quality across different objects requires meticulous attention to detail. And each step, from concept art creation, 3D modeling or texturing, can take up many hours or even days for complex projects.

Aware of this situation, one of the teams had a motivation: Imagine a world where nearly all game and miscellaneous assets can be created by a series of text prompts, cutting time-to-launch by weeks or month. And from there, the idea of “3DGenie” came to life.

How does it work?

• The starting point, as usual, is to create a text prompt.
• From there, the tool scrapes the game description on Homa Lab and generates a few image options using Midjourney (prompt to a 2D image).
• In the next step, a deep learning model trained to interpret 2D images and construct corresponding 3D objects comes in. It can understand shapes, depths, and textures, creating a detailed 3D model from the 2D rendering generated by Midjourney.
• The result is a ready-to-use 3D game asset, significantly reducing the time required for manual 3D modeling.

3D Genie allows you to get more variations on in-game assets cutting down on the time and money needed. But there are many other benefits and use cases:

• Empower studios with new game development workflows for 3D asset generation.
• Streamline the process to convert existing JPEGs to game-playable objects with real utility.
• Faster N-Testing of creatives and games being able to create varying art styles, graphics, and models in a faster and more efficient way.

3D Genie empowers developers to do the entire flow of creating a 3D asset by themselves, drastically reducing dependencies and costs. This allows smaller studios or even solo devs with less experience in art or low budgets to create high-quality projects.

So let’s go back to our motivation and ask: can you imagine a world where nearly all game and miscellaneous assets can be created by a series of text prompts, cutting time-to-launch by weeks or months? Who knows, that may become a reality at some point.

3. Game Idea Generator: from scratch to a complete game idea with built-in hit potential

Coming up with game ideas is hard. But coming up with ideas that fit into the current market, tap into audiences, leverage data, and resonate with the current trends, that’s another story. And even if you have a fantastic idea, defining the core mechanics and loops and finding reference images is often also complex and time-consuming.

With this in mind, one of the teams had a motivation: imagine being able to generate ideas and visuals based on a specific core loop, mechanics, themes, or even from scratch. And that’s how the “Game Idea Generator” came to life.

Game Idea Generator is an AI-based tool powered and hosted inside Homa Lab. The tool uses all the data in Homa’s tech platform to propose ideas that work within the meta of the current play stores and the trends that are being successful at a specific moment.

How does it work?

• Again, it all starts with a prompt. It can either be asking for an idea from scratch or an idea that’s related to another existing game, genre, theme, core mechanics, etc.
• The tool scrapes all the data in Homa Lab (like market trends and tested games) to ensure the output idea works well in the current market.
• The final result will be an extensive detailed idea with images for reference and inspiration.
• Due to randomness built within the data pipeline and on the prompt processing steps, the tool will offer enough variations to all users, always aligned with the market context.

The Game Idea Generator is the go-to tool when it comes to getting inspiration and finding ideas to create games. Its benefits and use cases are extensive:

• Leverage Homa Lab’s data analytics pipeline to generate ideas with hit potential built-in and based on actual trends with previously proven success in the market.
• Discover new trending mechanics and themes worth exploring for your next game.
• Streamline the ideation process automating the mass idea generation process.
• If you have an idea in mind, the tool also helps to define it, details it, and offers reference images for better understanding.

As we promise, here’s your spoiler for staying until the end:

*For now, it’s being beta tested in Homa Lab by our internal team and we’re working hard to prepare a public version available for all game studios very soon. Stay tuned!

This is just the beginning

Overall, Homa’s commitment to leveraging Generative AI in game creation has led to impressive results, including the development of innovative concepts like the ones described in this article, which have the potential to increase efficiency and streamline the game creation process.

But this is just the beginning. Stay tuned because there’s much more to come in Homa’s GenAI journey!

And if you're interested in all the technical aspects of the process of bringing the “ Game Idea Generator” to life. Don’t miss all the details in our Engineering Blog.