Hybrid development can feel like a race against the clock. Leveraging AI can streamline development, but with so many AI platforms out there, figuring out which tools to use and how to use them effectively can be overwhelming.
From sparking new ideas and speeding up iteration to coding playables and perfecting game difficulty, check out how to fast-track your hybrid development by using a range of AI tools.
Boosting ideation
AI-powered ideation makes the process of creating fresh ideas and themes quicker and easier. With Supersonic’s AI-powered Game Idea Generator, you can supercharge your hybrid with industry knowledge and best practices to speed up prototyping. The Game Idea Generator allows you to create new ideas, refine existing concepts, and even access initial code to kickstart your game in the Unity engine.
Backed with Supersonic expert insights, analysis, and market data, the Game Idea Generator can provide the building blocks for game development, including detailed game descriptions, narrative themes, and story outlines to anchor your gameplay.
Beyond content creation, the Game Idea Generator can inspire and enhance creatives, boost game mechanics with engaging gameplay systems, and help advance your game economy with tailored monetization strategies and revenue optimization ideas.
Improving iteration
1. Generating winning creatives
AI is a game-changer for creative iterations, helping to quickly produce high-quality assets and references that often outperform those created solely through manual methods.
This is especially helpful for seasonal campaigns, where holiday-themed assets need to be ready quickly. It makes workflows smoother and easier to manage during the busiest times of the year. On top of that, AI makes it easy to generate multiple variations, test them and refine them - helping to keep campaigns fresh and create winning content faster and more efficiently.
In Trash Tycoon, Supersonic’s creative team turned to an AI-powered image generator to create killer Halloween-themed river backgrounds and ground textures for these winning creatives.
2. Testing new icons
Testing icon variants is another area where AI tools can speed up iteration, allowing you to explore diverse styles, experiment with colors and compositions, and try out different options you may not have thought of before. And with multiple variations to choose from, you can focus on refining the most promising options, instead of starting from scratch.
Supersonic’s creative team leveraged AI in Color Match to add a unique 3D twist to their original 2D icon. As part of this process, they created a variety of 3D character assets with depth and vibrancy, while still maintaining Color Match’s colorful theme and playful style. This approach not only refreshed the icon’s visual appeal, it also ensured a cohesive visual identity across all touch points.
While AI tools provide a great starting point, it’s important to note that creating winning icons with AI depends on detailed prompts. Additionally, a designer's expertise in refining and perfecting these assets is essential to ensure they resonate with key audiences.
Supersonic’s creative team nailed Trash Tycoon’s winning icon by working with an AI art generator to perfect their design, and then fine-tuned the AI-generated icon to get it just right.
3. Creating 3D backgrounds and textures
Iterating mobile ad creatives is key to optimizing both ad performance and engagement. And that’s exactly where AI tools can help. By creating rich and realistic textures for playables and videos with different environmental settings and skin customizations, AI can produce a wide range of variations efficiently.
With so many variations to choose from, you can further test, refine, and optimize your creatives to maximize reach and make the most of your ad campaigns.
Tools like Skybox AI can create dynamic 360 degree skybox environments using text prompts to elevate gameplay visuals.
For example in Going Balls, Supersonic’s creative team used Skybox AI to simulate a real-life experience featuring a 3D responsive background that seamlessly moves with the ball, making gameplay feel more immersive.
Powering playables
When coding playables, tools like ChatGPT Enterprise save time by quickly generating the perfect code names. They help set clear naming conventions, improve code readability, and maintain a consistent style across all code names.
AI tools can also help format and refactor code to improve readability, reduce complexity, and enhance maintainability. In some Supersonic titles, developers have worked with AI to optimize code readability and performance. Below is an example of what that can look like.
Drilling down deeper into naming methods and variables, tools like GitHub and CoPilot can analyze the logic of your code and provide specific code names for easy functions and variables. When you provide your project's context and standards, these tools can automatically generate tailored recommendations.
Perfecting presets
If you’re looking to balance your game's difficulty curve to foster higher engagement, increase in-game purchases, and reduce player frustration, using a level analytics tool to access detailed behavioral data is a great place to start. Once you’ve got this data, AI tools like Gemini and CoPilot can help balance difficulty within specific layouts by setting up level presets faster than what’s humanly possible.
Here’s how it works. First up, it’s important to assess attempts per success (APS), which represents the sum of all attempts on a specific level, divided by the total amount of success. This information can guide you in deciding whether to adjust the difficulty for a smoother experience or to maintain its challenge. An AI chatbot can help create these presets.
For example, let’s say the APS is 4 at level 10 in your jam puzzle. This means on average it took players 4 attempts before they succeeded in passing this level. If you want to lower APS to make the level easier, you can give Gemini or CoPilot the conditions it needs to come up with a prediction about how to improve your grid layout.
Adjusting the level layout to better suit players can help you control level design. By experimenting with layout shapes, and sharing these designs with Gemini or CoPilot, you can get a prediction of the percentage of players likely to pass each level, based on layout.
Take puzzle games for example. Puzzle developers can use AI to change the layout of their grids and the order of obstacles to prevent player stagnancy. This tweak ensures players face new challenges, keeping gameplay engaging and fun.
By integrating predictions from Gemini or CoPilot into external engines, you can then get millions of simulations that mimic what can happen in a real-time environment. From these simulations, you’ll be able to get a deeper understanding of trends so you can better balance your layouts according to your preset goals.
Key AI tools paired with Supersonic expertise and guidance can accelerate hybrid development and take your game to new heights. Ready to experience it? Submit your game.
This Supersonic blog post is not affiliated with, endorsed by, or sponsored by Midjourney Ai, Skybox AI, ChatGPT Enterprise, GitHub, Gemini, or CoPilot, or any of their subsidiaries. Any mention of Midjourney Ai, Skybox AI, ChatGPT Enterprise, GitHub, Gemini, or CoPilot, or their products is solely for informational purposes and does not imply any endorsement or partnership.
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