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SUDDENLY over the last year, the meaning of AI shifted, and conversations over its use have run rampant.
AI used to mean how an NPC in a game moves or talks, but when you hear AI now, you picture melting faces, too many fingers, and nonsense word salad.
In many ways, AI has become a dirty word, but we should remember what AI does best, and has done for a long time.
We visited Candy Crush developer King in Stockholm, Sweden to talk about the company’s future.
Candy Crush is known for its incredibly loyal user base, and the team showed us the latest innovations awaiting beyond the horizon that keep the players coming back day after day.
These include the implementation of AI in their game routines, with a noticeable impact on titles such as Candy Crush Soda Saga and Farm Heroes Saga.
We spoke with King’s Head of AI, Luka Crnkovic-Friis, about how AI has been implemented in Candy Crush games without subjecting us to something akin to Willy’s Chocolate Experience.
Crnkovic-Friis says: “We have over 100 different use cases at King. Broadly, it falls into three large areas.
“There’s content automation, which is level design. The other is personalization, which is everything to do with recommendations.
“This is things like recommending a booster, recommending moves, recommending what to show after you have ended the game, and is based on the gameplay of the player.
“The third one is in performance marketing, which is the balance of how much do you pay when buying ads versus the estimated lifetime value of the player.”
If we break this down, the level design is the randomisation of the candy, trying to ensure that the candy to match feels random while still making matching and combos possible.
The second is about tailoring the experience to the user, encouraging people to spend their money while balancing what feels aggressive.
Finally, the AI is collecting data on users that can be sold to advertisers to show that buying ads with Candy Crush is worth their time.
Essentially, the AI is in charge of the busy work; the spreadsheets and algorithms that would be tedious for a person to do by hand.
Most importantly, there are humans overseeing the AI, making tweaks, and balancing the job it’s doing.
Crnkovic-Friis says: “I think the biggest challenge is that this is a massive game with lots of users.
“We have to make sure that when we are introducing a radical change that it doesn’t negatively affect the users.
“So there’s a lot of testing involved, and there’s some time between creating a feature and when it gets deployed.
“Candy Crush is a complex game [and you don’t want to] break anything when you replace an older component with a newer one.”
One of the biggest concerns about AI in games is that it could lead to job losses across the industry, and lower-quality content for users.
Crnkovic-Friis says this isn’t the aim at King: “What we are deploying are tools that empower Kingsters, making their jobs more efficient, more fun.
“That’s our view for the foreseeable future. If we look at generated content, it’s just not feasible for the level of quality that we need, the level of creativity that is required for it.
“And what we have now with level design, it’s the combination of a human designer that does the overall creative thinking, the storyline, the theme.
“Then the AI helps to optimize the right difficulty, and that it flows well.”
Last year, Microsoft acquired Activision Blizzard King, the largest purchase tech has ever seen, costing an unfathomable $70billion.
This has opened King up to more AI tools, and while Crnkovic-Friis says the company has no plans to use generative AI, his enthusiasm for OpenAI, which encompasses ChatGPT and video AI Sora, tells a different story.
He says: “Microsoft opened up a lot for us and also indirectly to our partnership with OpenAI, we got access to things that we would not have if we were not part of it.
“And it’s amazing to be able to have this close relationship with world leading companies.”
In return King can offer Xbox a way into the lucrative mobile industry, an area Xbox is severely behind in.
Crnkovic-Friss says: “Xbox has no real mobile presence. So this is a really new thing for them.
“A new way of looking at game development. the traditional triple-A games, they’re like blockbuster movies and were like a TV show.
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“But there will be a Candy Crush in 10 years and it won’t be Candy Crush 2. It will still be Candy Crush.
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