They have entered the scene with a bang, a multimodal mashup of the real and imagined worlds of social interaction, gaming and artificial intelligence. Astrocade AI, which just announced it has raised $12 million in seed funding, is a social gaming platform designed to transform the way users game and create artworks. Astrocade’s innovative platform aims to reshape the gaming ecosystem through the creation of a powerful, multimodal space that connects gamers, tinkerers and gamemakers while enabling users to effortlessly explore the infinite realms of human creativity.
At the centre of Astrocade is a simple idea. Using AI to let users create, share and play games in ways they never could before. But why such a lofty goal? ‘Beneath all of our passions, whether gaming, socialising or AI, is this idea of human creativity,’ says Amir Sadeghian, Astrocade’s CEO. ‘That’s a fundamental human need, not just a cultural one.’ This triangular ideal is distilled into a ‘dance of creation’ that Astrocade hopes will allow players to work together to create games.
From Stanford’s AI lab and Google’s labs, Astrocade’s founders, with roots in the campus’s rocky history of tech advancements and socio-linguistic experiments, believed that advanced AI could be deployed for the benefit of the prized gamers, forging new connections of social cohesion with a common language – that of play.
Its generative AI platform gives players the ability to summon games at will, with text-based commands. It’s a tool that makes it easy for everyone from indie developers to DIY artists to leave their mark on a digital playground of their creation. It transforms game-making into something as accessible as video-sharing is with TikTok.
Now in alpha, the company is developing its proprietary AGO (Artificial Gaming Intelligence), which will allow users to create games using ordinary human language. No laborious coding, which is generally the only way to create a game, will be necessary.
Astrocade hopes to be in a universe where people can not only play together, but also forge meaningful connections in a way that we don’t often reflect on in the context of gaming. Using gaming as a vehicle for relationships is a social endeavour, a way to take something that is often solitary and turn it into something communal.
In an era dominated by giants like Roblox and Fortnite, Astrocade embraces the human ideal of making a game without the need for code-fu. It opens the gates to creativity, and casts a net wide enough such that, if you have a dream, you can have a game. If you want to create a game with characters that enjoy themselves eating watermelons in a pool, you can. Concentrating on story, immersion and happy creative chaos is what Astrocade is all about.
At its essence, Astrocade is about community. It’s about technology connecting people through a shared creative lens, and it’s about those shared creative experiences transcending the digital divide. It’s about AI being used to bring us together rather than just entertain us. Whether through creation, play or simple wonderment, Astrocade is perhaps a model for our AI-powered future.
Astrocade exploits the power of AI not to build games, but to create a more open, creative and connected world. It’s a bold vision and, with the right backers and a determined leadership, Astrocade could blow open the barriers dividing social gaming, and create a product to keep an eye on in the years to come.
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