Unity is expanding its use of generative artificial intelligence with a new capability it calls “artificial intelligence driven authoring,” positioned to let developers build entire casual games in the Unity engine without writing code. The company plans to introduce the technology at the Game Developer Conference in March, reflecting rising enthusiasm among major game industry players for artificial intelligence assisted development. Unity previously experimented with artificial intelligence features such as facial animation tools and is now moving to a more ambitious, workflow-spanning system.
Unity chief executive Matthew Bromberg said that “At the Game Developer Conference in March, we’ll be unveiling a beta of the new upgraded Unity AI, which will enable developers to prompt full casual games into existence with natural language only, native to our platform-so it’s simple to move from prototype to finished product.” The focus on casual games underscores that the first generation of this technology is aimed at less complex experiences than large scale AAA titles and raises open questions about how sophisticated the automatically generated projects can become and how much human intervention they will still require. Bromberg explained that the natural language model will be “powered by our unique understanding of the project context and our runtime,” and that this combination will “provide more efficient, more effective results to game developers than general-purpose models alone.”
Under the hood, Unity relies on a mixture of first party and third party artificial intelligence models at different stages of the Unity artificial intelligence pipeline, governed by policies set out in its Unity artificial intelligence legal guidelines. The announcement arrives shortly after a State of the Game Industry Survey found that many workers at large studios are already using generative artificial intelligence across multiple disciplines, yet most of those workers believe its widespread use ultimately harms the industry. Reports from employees at Electronic Arts indicate that increased reliance on generative tools has sometimes reduced time and efficiency rather than improving them, even after extended use. Despite these concerns, Electronic Arts’ new owner intends to keep pivoting toward artificial intelligence to significantly cut operating costs, signaling a broader trend in which game engines and development platforms integrate more artificial intelligence tooling even as skepticism among creators grows.
